IT Professionals

What If Google Just Ceased To Exist?

Posted by on Dec 8, 2008 | 11 Comments

The very idea of Google ceasing to be must sound like something based on wishful thinking for its competitors. Yet at the same time, the fact is that if the company suddenly went under, all of those who so thoughtfully opted to go for the idea of using software as a service with their Office applications, email amongst others, might find themselves in a pinch. Then again, I would point out that I am not an expert of all of the ins/outs of how Google’s enterprise offerings work. Maybe there is a barrier of safety here by running your own Google appliance; this I am not totally sure of.

But one thing I do know for sure is that, for the everyday Google Search user, things would regress to what they were in the 1990s overnight. Seriously, are we going to actually try to go back to using those limited Meta Search engines again? It would be a nightmare from just about every angle.

And this brings me to today’s question — what would you do with your search queries if Google suddenly ceased to exist? Hotbot? Yahoo? Hit the comments; enlighten me.

  • http://quickcampus.com Miguel

    I guess Yahoo! is the next best alternative. You are right on

    “But one thing I do know for sure is that for the everyday Google Search user, things would regress to what they were in the 1990’s”

    I mean, I began to use gmail just a few months ago and I don’t know what I’ll do without it.

  • http://www.goretsky.com/ Aryeh Goretsky

    Hello,

    I am reasonably sure there are substitutes for all of Google’s offerings. They may not be exact twins, but they probably provide enough functionality the people could use them, albeit with not the same amount of convenience as they would if they were in one place.

    Yahoo! and Microsoft Live both seem to give valid search results when I use them. I’ve also used the Dogpile meta-search engine when I needed to look for results from different engines.

    Regards,

    Aryeh Goretsky

  • http://www.flowerlandilms.com Sven Vollstag

    …i use yahoo now…
    …mesa hate google…

  • http://n.a. Duane Foote

    Smile!

  • bigbluemarble

    I think there would be a lot less “Ads by Google” cluttering every square inch of the internet for sure. Its like graffiti tags by Google.

  • http://www.calcresult.com/news.html Mike

    Rather more chance of Microsoft going bust!

  • Diana Wilcox

    I’m horrified at the very thought! No Google? That’s almost as scary and world changing as the ‘God is Dead’ era.

  • Shtanto

    I’d quit the internet and just play Oblivion and Spore all day.

  • http://www.netmarketingchaos.com/web-20/using-twitter-for-up-to-the-minute-searching.html John

    I’d probably use Twitter most of the time. In fact, I already do use it for a lot of things.

    You can get far more current results (like within seconds) from search.twitter.com than you can from Google. And if you have a decent number of followers, you can get answers to almost any question pretty quickly as well.

    And because they’re coming from real people, the quality of the results tends to be pretty high. Even Google gets gamed and you’ll find some junk in their results sometimes.

  • http://nospam Tim

    I’d rather see the Feds bail out Google if it was ever needed (God forbid!) than those criminals they’re currently throwing all of our cash at.

  • http://www.femmedor.com octect

    For those who say that tweeter is just as good :
    enter “delphi nagios” without quotes. You´ll get a nice “no results found”. Try this in google and you get hundreds of results. No, I am sorry, most have a long way to reach google. Yahoo is next close to them, I guess.