Brian Hancock

[caption id="attachment_39" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Google Fail Whale"] [/caption] It sucks having all of our eggs in one basket, that's what!  The general public has no idea just how dependent the web as a whole is on Google services and today was a great example of just how much sites rely on Google. So search is down.  Well, that means that site owners will lose out on potential traffic and resulting leads/sales/advertising dollars during that downtime, as well as the potential future business from those clients.  Google loses out on all the paid search revenue from searchers not clicking on their sponsored ads in search results (let's keep it simple and forget for a minute that Google can and will deviate from a paid campaign's daily budget to make up for the shortfall).  Is this where the problem ends?  Unfortunately not... A large portion of sites on the Interwebs not only rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, they also rely on Google services to generate revenue (Google Adsense) and analyze the activity on their sites (Google Analytics).  Now if Google's down, these applications are of course down which means site owners can't use them.  So what's the big deal?  The bigger problem is these applications are executed when these non-Google websites are loaded, thus when Google's down, these sites are down.  Most sites put Google Analytics code at the bottom of their pages right before the closing body tag, but Adsense code is all over sites, top, middle, bottom, etc.  During today's outage, many popular sites wouldn't even load! These are just some of the things that effected site owners, but what about all of the other services we rely on Google for:

• Gmail for email
• YouTube for videos
• Google Docs for online document storage/collaboration
• Google News
• Google Reader
• iGoogle Homepage
• Google Apps
• etc. etc. etc.

Things were so crazy today that people had to resist the urge to 'Google' the issue.  I went to Yahoo and did a search for 'Google Outage' and 'Google Down' with no avail.  Then I used my noggin and did a search on Twitter and confirmed that I wasn't the only person experiencing an issue.  Needless to say, their realtime search for 'Google Down' had tens to hundreds of updates every minute of more and more people Tweeting about the issues they were experiencing. Getting back to the issue at hand, yes, the web as a whole relies on Google way too much at this point.  From site owners, to marketers, to the general users, we're all drinking the Google Kool Aid and loving every sip.  Unless they keep having issues, things will continue in this fashion.  However, a couple of hours of outages a year is very small in the scheme of things (greater than the 99.99% uptime most web hosts promise and more reliable than a typical corporate LAN) and with some of the most sophisticated data centers on Earth, I doubt Google will continue to experience too many hiccups...