Ask HN: If Google were to disappear How prevalent is Google in your life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If Google were to disappear How prevalent is Google in your life?

6 pointsgoldenv8 comments

List Google products/services you use multiple times a week (OK to say "too many to list"). Extra: Try to guess on average how many Google searches you perform on average per week. Here's all their products/services for reference - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

As for me, not only do I use search, news, gmail, calendar, maps, docs, keep, youtube, chrome, android, nexus; I also use Google apps and google cloud (for hosting/computing) for my startup. I probably do 100+ searches on avg per week. A bit worried :)

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Google is exactly as indispensible as Altavista, Borland, Ashton-Tate or MySpace.

If Google died overnight, very few would really care. There are plenty of other replacements.

The only ones who would care would be journalists who would proceed to bore us for weeks with articles about how amazing Google once was. It would also spawn a subgenre of writing about the putative sainthoods of Brin and Page ( a la the current cult of Job )

In terms of search engine services. Probably won't suffer much. Will be over bing. It gives satisfying results and is (still) not much saturated by ads.

Over google maps will be tougher as bing maps are not that much developer in this region.

G+, while I use it, it won't hurt me much at this point.

SEO - well, this will hit me a bit and our clients a lot. Not a SEO company, but a lot of the clients have some sort of white hat SEO.

Will use some business apps that we use for gmail for some of our domains.

On the rest, I have migrated to MS services, thus google won't hurt mail, calendars, tasks, cloud storage that much for me.

But this is highly hypothetical situation. The chances of google disappearing is lower than ... I don't know...countries collapsing.

I'd be pretty cheesed-off if there had been no warning about it so I could get a copy of my gmail messages. It would be the ultimate incentive to use another mail provider.

Other than that I would be pretty happy. No mode analytics tracking you everywhere (not that I allow this anyway). No more javascript/ajax hosting from them (yay). No more silly fonts (yay). No more youtube (perhaps people will provide actual download links).

I guess I would miss the occasional use of their translator.

google maps, gmail and google docs would be tough to replace, but I think we'd adapt pretty quickly. waze is pretty good, outlook is different but not necessarily bad, and I could probably use Dropbox more. And to be honest I search more on DuckDuckGo now than I do Google. I don't think google is indispensable, it's just consolidated, which makes it more convenient.

Every of Googles products can be replaced by a 90-95% as good product (Bing etc.). Android would be the biggest "loss" but as it is based on open source code a replacement would be there quickly.

ALl my knowledge about life will be gone.

On a serious note, I use it constantly but only for research and mail, which I think would be easily replaceable.

I used to search Usenet news at least weekly. Google's changes to search of Usenet have made searching Usenet a pointless exercise.

No other product comes close to Google Maps imo.

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