Most Internet users rely heavily on Google. They use Google to search, Google Mail for emails, Google Reader for feed reading, Google Adsense or Adwords in their business and various other Google services. That got me thinking about the consequences of a Google downtime. What would you do if Google went down completely for a few hours or even days.
Would you be affected at all? Would you be able to access other systems and use them until Google would be up again? One serious problem with a company that has such a large market share is that their demise would affect a large part of the population. Pretty much everyone would be affected in one way or another if Google services would not be accessible anymore.
The Download Squad published an article yesterday about Google being down for 18 minutes. It turned out to be a false alarm and a problem of the Internet Provider Verizon and not Google.
Imagine how much buzz a downtime of an hour or two would create on the Internet. So, coming back to the initial question. What would you do and how would you be affected if Google went down right now?
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28 Responses to “If Google Went Down What Would You Do?”
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[...] articles that amused me, mainly because I hadn’t noticed outages in the past. Once was titled “If Google Went Down, What Would You Do?”; this one made me laugh a little as I realized my internal answer was shock as the possibility [...]
it would be END OF THE WORLD…
Good question, thanks Martin.
I think I should get one or two backup emails, and search for Cyrillic-friendly groups service.
That is most important things I use Google for. Except them I can fare well without it, I think.
If Google were down, I wouldn’t be reading this since my RSS feed would go down. That is the only thing I depend on Google for now. Although if Google was going to be down for hours or days, I would just switch to an alternate reader. Thinking of this, I just exported my feed list. [lol]
For search I could use Yahoo or others. While I have 2 GMail accounts, I don’t use them regularly.
I would use Yahoo for search, & for email as well. I have my yahoo mail account setup to download all my Gmail messages. So while I wouldn’t be getting new emails during an outage, I would still have access to my old ones.
For Reader problems I exported my subscriptions to an OPML file, which I can import to any other feed reader.
Yowch. If Google went down, like Jojo I wouldn’t be reading this… apart from a few feeds I keep in Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, I depend on Google Reader for RSS.
I do have backup personal email accounts, but my company uses Google Apps for email, so I’d lose business email completely. Guess I should look into a backup solution.
But hey, at least Twitter would still be there! ;)
I’d switch to Yahoo! for e-mail and default search engine… I can do without Google, which I use far more than I serve ;)
Go get a life!
I’d fap then.
I would be screwed, I like so many, rely on Google on a daily basis, they hold my primary email, my main feed reader. I’ve recently begun using notebook & Google Docs, very nice as well. They will soon have my healthcare records and then next thing you know they’ll have a dating service, they’ll begin matching & breeding people for their own purposes based on the TON of information they know about everyone. We need google, google needs us.
I for one welcome our Google overlords…
It would be tough, but I might be able to get by with Yahoo. The questions is, if Google went down, what would millions of online business’ do?
I have backups of everything in the event of a long outage, and I can’t see Google ever going away for good. Even AOL persists, and they don’t even have a fraction of Google’s viable products.
Nice web services don’t go down.
Google will never go down :)
That’s an interesting question. It also lets me think about another question: If Google is a devil how can we do?
I remember when a DDoS attack brought Google down in 2004. I was like, let me go search to see what’s going on…oh crap.
Call my lawyers and see how much money I can make?
Well I use hotmail for email, and Firefox for feeds, so I’d only be affected for searching. Fortunately if hotmail went down, I’ve a few Google email accounts to use instead.
Like everyone else, most of my life revolves around using Google.
Google for search, Google Reader for feeds, Google docs and spreadsheets for collaborating with people and Google Notebook for quick notes to myself.
In a way I wish I could move away from using Google so much, but it’s become too engrained in my life and I can’t think off a better feed reader (I’ve tried a lot of them, from online to desktop)
I think it happened just this year, although, just gmail. many people cried out, but if it’s only a day or two, there’s always yahoo and the like.. :)
I’d be stuck’d, use it for “everything”, thanks for the good question, have made my backups now ;) cheers
Now we know. Gmail is down and it is killing me.
I would be in serious trouble, I use their search, email, maps, news and browser every day, I’m not very familiar with yahoo, when I first started using google in ‘03 I haven’t really used anything else, I suppose I could use yahoo for search, cnn for news, hotmail for email, and IE, but not for more than a day.
Well…currently I believe that Google is down. Maybe it’s just on their European servers, but I cannot access Google from any computer that I have tried. My worst fears are coming true…
Matthias, I’m finding the same thing, except it’s only their web servers. POP3 retrieval from gmail to my email client appears to be working fine, and pings are responding to google.ca (where I am).
It sort of feels like the power going down and the din falling silent.
All of Google’s services (search, gmail, CorpMail, Maps) have been down for our entire office for nearly 30-minutes so far. This is a first for us. Red Bank, NJ
Google is down for me too. Everything, search, mail, the whole shebang.
Down in DC as well. This might just be the thing that pushes me to diversify my web experience.