These are silly what if's. What if airplanes stopped working, what if car stopped working , etc...
your what if will be valid when the internet shutdown god forbid.

I don't think it will affect world economy as much... Google has a monopoly on the consumer market, but not on the enterprise, B2B market where all the real stuff is going on.
On the other hand it did happen to me that I needed a document quickly that was on Google Docs, but the service was unavailable for hours, I learned my lesson and I always keep a backup on my computer just in case.

An interesting question, but here is a more likely question: What if google started charging for their service?  (i.e. it stopped working for free).  Not much, lets say 1/10th of Cent per search or 10 bucks a year for unlimited.  Would this change the way you use the net?  Is 10 bucks a year worth it?  Could google do to the net what Big Oil has done to recently (i.e. they have people hooked, so they can raise the price as much as they want)?

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E se um dia o Google parasse de funcionar? | DanielCamargo

Hi, I translate your post to Portuguese. I Agree with you, I love Google, but... Google isn´t a good guy, Google is a company that want money, it is a fact. I really appreciate your post.
Tell me if there is something wrong or missing something.

It will be a huge catastrophe for the whole world and the world economy
Take it easy dude
there is always an alternative, google is not everything, by the way search engines like yahoo or msn, 95% gives u the same results
that google provides, so its a catastrophe, you will get used to it within 1 week and forget all about google

No, Alaa, it really would be a catastophy for many reasons.

Firstly, if Google suddenly died then people would switch to other search engines, primarily MSN Live and Yahoo (who have the next highest market shares). But that would increase the stress on those search engines by almost two orders of magnitude instantaneously. There is no way they could continue to function correctly and, consequently, they would almost certainly fold under the pressure.

Secondly, the sudden death of Google would have a huge effect on the world economy. As a low-overhead hi-tech company, our profits correlate very strongly with our Google page rank. Other search engines have completely different page ranks and we have spent years building only our Google page rank. If Google died and everyone migrated to other search engines, where we do not rank highly, our company would go bankrupt very quickly.

Finally, this situation may not even be unlikely. I believe the economic effects of Google's death could be predicted quite accurately so it should be possible to make a huge amount of money by gambling appropriately on Google's imminent death and then causing it yourself (e.g. by bombing Google's computers or network core). A terrorist could do this but I suspect it would be even more likely that a disgruntled Google employee would do this.

Google can't suddenly die in a way that you describe  Jon Harrop, hardware doesn't go up in smoke *poef* niether does the software or its employees. Moreover because google is a company that is on the stock market they are subject to rules that would prevent going bankrupt the next day, next week or next month without anyone taking note.  They need a certain amount of monney in the bank, etc.

"If Google died and everyone migrated to other search engines, where we do not rank highly, our company would go bankrupt very quickly."
You have 0% return rate of customers? Is it possible to only fool google that you get a high ranking and get away with it? If you get ranked high on google and it is for legitimate reasons it's almost impossible not to be know/ranked with other search engines? Sure you might not be as high but invisible is impossible for companies with a size that matters.

"Finally, this situation may not even be unlikely. I believe the economic effects of...."
Google's much debated architecture makes this extremely unlikely(it's probably easier to take out the chinese or us army). It doesn't have a core as it is distributed, distributed and distributed. Killing it's supplies might be hard too as they use commodity hardware for (almost)everything. And they are based al around the world, sure the us has some bases here and there but google has data centers located everywhere not just countries that are allies of US or China.

Also mind you that your not the only company with a problem, all of your competitors are cripple too.

ps. if hell freezes over I'm more likely to turn to the one most of use used before google came around: altavista

On a more technical/serious note: afaik gtalk uses Jabber which is open etc Mail and blogger software etc shouldn't be that hard to come by.

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armchaircritic  » Blog Archive   » Google search, and our dependence upon it..

You make a good point, Mike, that Adnan misunderstands.  Sure, airplanes and cars crash, systems fail.  However, we don't usually all rely on one single service such as Google.

In the olden days there was a service called Deja News, that kept an archive of all the old newsgroups.  It was great for researching and such.  When it failed, there was momentary chaos until Google took it over.  If Google decides to stop archiving these items, then chaos reigns again.

More importantly, Google is a business, and is motivated by money and profit.  No problems there - so am I.  But if Google decides its search feature isn't paying off, it could very well discontinue it.  Or, if Google itself gets into financial trouble, it may simply shut down.  What then?

It's not paranoia to consider such things.  Many of us do rely heavily on Google.  Without it, we would have a poorer experience on the Internet, would have less ability to do research, would lose many services we rely on.  Yes, we could survive; but it would be frustrating and inconvenient.

pererinha, what's wrong with wanting money? Don't YOU want money?

What's wrong with earning something through hard-work and great ideas?

Google has an on-going record of FANTASTIC ideas!

And what's so evil in wanting to benefit financially from the fruits of your mind and labour? That doesn't make them evil. It makes them smart.

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