About 1.6 billion people use the Internet every day. Out of all of those people, about 70% of them use Google as their preferred search engine. My question for you is a simple one: What would happen if Google ceased to exist? This thought came to me today when a Google outage brought the Internet to a crawl.
I’m sure the first answer that comes to mind is “Omg, the world would implode!” Well, I’m here to tell you that the world probably wouldn’t implode, but it would have serious repercussions. Almost every major website on the Internet relies on Google in some way. Many sites receive almost all of their traffic directly from Google searches while other use Google services such as Gmail or Adsense for their business. If something critical happened to Google, what would these businesses do? What would the end-users do? What would we all do?
Today some of us caught a small glimpse of what the Internet would be like if Google suddenly disappeared. Every website that used any Google service almost completely shut down because the external scripts hosted on Google’s servers were inaccessible (this site included). I personally found myself lost and confused. My Gmail was down and Google was down so I couldn’t ‘Google’ what the problem was. I couldn’t get on Google Talk to ask any other web heads what was wrong either. I tried using Live Search and Yahoo to no avail. My only savior was ‘poor man’s email‘, Twitter. Twitter was running rampant with people twittering about the Google outage.
On that note, I think the answer is clear as to what we would do without Google: Twitter.
