if you dont trust your servers uptime, you could pull googles primary search page or any other well known page with multiple mirrors guaranteed to come up.

The corporate scenario, while possible, is improbable. More over, if that was the case, the IT department would have a pretty good handle on software management, awasu would be under configuration control, and the IT guy would set up the defaults as they should be. Perfect world scenario, but I definitely see the IT guy as the fall guy for an intranet only setup.