Moment of Zen

Breakdown - How dependent is the Web on Google?

On May 14th the Internet users could not reach Google due to a routing-problem. This includes not only the search engine which many users think Google is only! But Google is much more than only this search engine: have a look at this German webpage http://www.drweb.de/magazin/google-dienste-kann-alles-weis-alles/ and you will count more than 70 tools that Google offers! There are the ones everyone knows and others that not everybody knows that they belong to Google , but they are as important as the popular ones.

1. Of course there is at first the search engine. If Google Search is not accessible, many users do not know how to handle other search engines and probably they do even not know where to find and how to use them!
2. Then there is YouTube. Did all of you know that YouTube belongs to Google?? If Google Search does not work, YouTube does not either. At first glance this does not sound, well, disturbing. But how many of us do have their 4 or 5 webpages they visit daily (mailaccounts, newsfeeds and probably YouTube and so on) and if one does not work, that is quite annoying!
3. blogger.com: Many of us have their blogs on blogger.com or blogspot.com. These pages also belong to Google! If Google broke down we could not post our Moments of Zen and other blog entries, and we would not receive points for that! You see, the Web is dependent on Google to a really high degree, it has also got far-reaching influence on the daily "offline" life!
4. There are probably some of us sharing their collection of photos on Picasa. This page cannot be accessed and if you used photos from Picasa in your blog entries or on your webpages, then these photos will not be shown, just because Google has broken down!
5. Do not forget Google Earth and Google Maps!

These are the most important Google tools that we get into contact with frequently, but there are others, such as Google Analytics and Google AdSense, which, if they cannot work properly due to Google´s breakdown, are responsible for the deathless loading times of web pages - everyone has experienced this at least some times and one always wonders if his or her PC has got a virus or something so that the pages cannot be loaded properly!
But it is all (of course not always, but often :) ) up to Google!

The continuative question now is: What can we as Internet users do against this dependency on Google? "Nothing", many will think. But a first step could be to try out Microsoft´s new search engine Bing! This shall not be advertising, but one has to ´fight´ against Google´s monopoly!


Try it out, folks!



annotation by the author: I used the names of Google and its tools this often and repeated them volitionally to show to what extent Google influences one´s online web behavior! Not that anyone accuses me of a bad syntax or of a ´narrow´ and restricted lexis! ;)