Last week Google suffered something of a small, very brief outage. Such a small outage, just for a few hours, would hardly have been noticed for almost any website on the Internet, except for Google. For when Google goes down, it takes a large part of the Internet with it.
It has been speculated that around 5% of the Internet went down for two hours last week as a direct result of Google’s little hiccup. You see, Google has become more than just a search engine (albeit it a search engine with over 64% of market share in the US according to comScore), no, Google is much more than just that.
Sites running Google analytics would have suffered as a result of the outage. Anyone using Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, indeed anything Google related would have been hit by the down time. That is of course not forgetting the bulk of Internet searches that could not be made, leaving people with no option but to try the spam filled results pages of lesser engines such as Yahoo!, or even Microsoft’s Live.com.
If ever there was a need to realise just how helpless we all are without Google, the events of last Thursday showed us that.
No Google, no Internet. There’s a horrible thought.
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