Google Incident Makes Us Feel Vulnerable

One has to wonder if the web has become too dependent on Google. News sites such as ourselves rely on them for search engine traffic, news traffic, and of course advertising revenue from their adsense product. While it wouldn't be a complete showstopper not having them, we would take a large hit in revenue and traffic if they were gone the next day. Ecommerce sites that rely on user searches for a particular product to buy heavily rely on the search engine being online and directing customers to their products. Just how bad is our reliance on the search engine company?

Let's say the entire Googleplex goes offline for a week. What would the result be to our economy? You would hope that it wouldn't be drastic but I tend to think it would be. Online retailers would suffer the most from loss of sales but then you have remaining sites that rely on the search engine traffic which in result provides sites income from ad revenue. Sure people would 'eventually' head over to Yahoo, Live, or some other search engine site to find what they are looking for. However, based on our experiences most of the search engine traffic comes from Google. Perhaps that would become Yahoo if Google were down.

Clearly the massive search engine giant isn't hardened against human error, case in point this weekend a simple human error on the keyboard of placing a "/" somewhere it shouldn't have been brought the search engine completely down - at least in my books. None of the searches from 6:30AM PST - 7:25AM PST were redirecting to the sites when you clicked on the link, instead you were sent to a warning that the site was flagged for malware content. A company can have all of the latest and greatest infrastructure in place but still be victim of human error like the rest of us.

While Google resolved this issue fairly quickly, you can't help but stop and think - what if this was a greater outage? It leaves many site owners, CEO's, and ecommerce business feeling vulnerable and almost like your hands are tied with nothing you can do about it. As always, it's not always a great idea to put all your eggs in one basket.