Search giant Google was knocked offline for a brief period over the weekend, due to what the company characterized as a DNS issue. All of Google's Web sites were temporarily inaccessible during the outage, sparking fears that the world's largest Internet property had been hacked.

Fueling the speculation were bloggers, who quickly spread word of the problem and claimed they were being redirected to SoGoSearch.com when attempting to visit Google.com.

However, the redirect was actually caused by a user's Web browser itself, which tacks on domain name suffixes, such as .com and .net when it cannot locate a Web address.

Specifically, SoGoSearch comes up on any address ending in .com.net, which includes Google.com.net. When some Web browsers were unable to locate a DNS record for Google.com, they sent users to Google.com.net.

The issue led some users to raise further concerns about phishing or other malicious attacks inadvertently caused by such a feature.

"It was not a hacking or a security issue," Google spokesperson David Krane told the Associated Press. "We've remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide."

Although it was inaccessible, Google's network was still functional as always. Some desperate Web searchers resorted to using Google's IP address to reach the site.