What If Google Suddenly Stops Working?

I remember a moment that happened some weeks ago when Google was unavailable to me. I needed to search for something, but I couldn’t reach Google. I could visit other web sites, but not Google. I asked my friends if Google was working for them, some of them told me that it was working, while other ones said that it wasn’t working for them either. In a few minutes it started working again. So, I suppose it was a temporary problem with my ISP, probably some DNS problems.

But I swear it was such a frustrating moment! I did get stuck when I wanted to Google something, but I couldn’t reach Google. I tried some other search-engines, like Live and Yahoo! But they didn’t bring me the results I wanted and the results I got when Google got back to working again.

Now imagine that something bad happens and Google stops working for the whole world, not only its search engine, but Gmail, GoogleDocs, Blogger and many other services. The communication (Gmail, Gtalk) will get frozen; the documents (GoogleDocs), the advertisements won’t be shown (AdSense) will become unavaliable. It will be a huge catastrophe for the whole world and the world economy.

People tend to complain about Microsoft being an aggressive monopolistic company, but in the same time those people are depend on the other company – Google that is a huge monopoly on web market.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to sound like a paranoiac, I don’t tell people not to use Google because they are in fact a monopolistic company. I love Google ?! I just tell the facts.

Mike Borozdin (Twitter)
2 July 2008

The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. My personal thoughts tend to change, hence the articles in this blog might not provide an accurate reflection of my present standpoint.

© Mike Borozdin