A World Without Google

from the can't-imagine-it dept

Want to know just how important Google is to people around the world? The site goes down for fifteen minutes and the web lights up with concerned articles and blog posts everywhere about the missing Google. For all those random stories about web addiction, perhaps it's just Google that we're addicted to. Of course, part of the concern was that many people were apparently being sent to some other search engine when they went looking for Google, but that's being explained away as well. Basically, the problem with Google was a DNS issue, where it more or less disappeared from the web for those fifteen minutes. Without a Google.com to find in the DNS database, some systems went looking for alternates by appending a .net to the end of google.com, leading surfers to a website by the company that owns .com.net -- which is why many believed Google was hijacked.