It's a big deal when Google goes down. Big G has become so synonymous with the ubiquitous "web" that someone saying "Google is down" sounds kind of like saying "Oxygen: gone!"
So if Google did go down today, as some say, it caused a rare moment that our Quentin Hardy once described as "the air leaving the room."
As a web consumer, it's easy to forget how ingrained Google is into our every day browsing. But when Google goes down, just like a room without air, the web starts to suck a little. It's an idea most people can probably understand a gut level, but it's also something that I'm increasingly aware of at a programming level too.
Developers like me use Google code all the time. Google Maps are everywhere because it's a herculean task to code up custom mapping software. Aside from time spent "reinventing the wheel," Google also has the "cheap" argument going for it too: witness the use of Google Analytics by something like half of the top 10,000 websites on the web.
Google has quite the online footprint, and from Charts to App Engine the functionality is great -- that is, until Google goes down.
To understand my point, know that the Google code that developers drop into web pages -- be it for Google Maps or Analytics -- makes a call to a Google server each time its loaded into a user's browser. Also know that by design, scripts block a Web browser from doing parallel downloads, so browsers have to wait until a script is downloaded from Google before moving on to any others.
What that means that if coders are stupid enough to put Google-based code at the top of a web page instead of the bottom, they'll lose the entire Web page if Google ever goes down. Why? Because the browser is stuck waiting for code that will never come.
In that way, a Google outage is more than just losing Gmail access or not getting into Google Docs. Twitter, for example, recently rolled out Google location maps for its tweets. As some of its users found out today, some JavaScript-based functionality (like sending tweets) can be totally wiped out by a Google script that won't load.
Google definitely makes my life easier, but the more and more we default to coding software and packages hosted by Google -- or any "cloud"-based service -- the more reliant we become on these companies' servers staying up and online.
When Google goes down, the rest of the Web is left hanging, too. It's something to think about, even if only when YouTube is unavailable.
