Doh! When your market cap is pushing $150 billion, and you're buying companies and adding new products on a daily basis, it's inevitable that a few administrative details will fall through the cracks - especially when your M.O. is to embrace chaos. For Google (GOOG), one of those details was Germany: TechCrunch reports -- and Google diva Marissa Mayer later confirmed -- that the Google.de homepage went down yesterday because the Google gang forgot to renew the domain.

Thus in the early hours of Tuesday morning, Google.de pointed to an ad for Internet host Goneo. In fact, The Register reports that somehow more than one opportunist swooped in to grab the domain, one of whom confessed he was simply illustrating to his girlfriend "how one of my domains had been taken over by somebody else with the Goneo ordering system." To prove he was a nice, Google-fearing geek, however, he gave the domain back without asking for compensation. (TechCrunch readers are shocked!)

To be fair to Marissa and crew, it seems the German domain name registration system is a bit complex, but The Browser is not sure which is less reassuring: Google being so disorganized or Germany failing at bureaucracy.