If you hadn’t heard, Google had an outage last week. And, of course, it put the general internet community in a state of outright panic. Then Google fixed the problem(s) it had and life went on as usual.
I’ve been using the internet long enough to where I remember what it was like before Google. Even though the site made its appearance in 1998, people really didn’t start switching over to it until after 2000.
Speaking of which, the big G currently commands 63% of the market in the United States. Yes, that’s an overwhelming number, however, it still proves that Google doesn’t rule over all of it. It also proves that people are willing to use something else when necessary.
What I do remember about internet searching in the pre-2000 era is that the playing field, search engine-wise, was more even. If you first went to Yahoo and couldn’t find what you wanted, you headed over to Lycos. Or Hotbot. Or WebCrawler. And there were more. Each had its own way of getting the information you needed. Each had its own "personality", so to speak. And people liked it. But that’s a bygone era now.
Or is it?
I do purposely try other search services just to see what’s out there. Instead of using Lycos or Hotbot like I did years ago, I now use a combination of blog, messaging and video searches.
One of my personal favorites is Icerocket for blogs and messaging searches.
Example: If you search for nintendo punch-out (a game being released today for the Wii today, site), you not only see what people are saying about the game, but also immediate references for each result as well, including the number count (something Google’s blog search doesn’t do). The interface is a whole lot more inviting and it’s just easier to use compared to "The Google Way".
So can you live without Google?
Yes.
As long as you’re aware of alternatives like Icerocket or others like Kosmix (which is really nice by the way), A9 and so on, you’re in good shape.
Granted, some try some crazy ideas, like Faroo does, but hey, alternatives are good because sometimes they bring around great things.
Living without Google would be fine for me. Because I don’t use Blogger, Chrome, Gears, Gmail. And I’m sure I can live without it’s search engine. Yahoo and Live Search do fine.
Anyone remember the AltaVista search engine?
That was an excellent resource initially, and then it went portal (or should I say portly
.
I thought it had expired, but it seems to still be around, and has slimmed down again.
I originally started using AltaVista because of the Babel Fish translator (it translates languages), and even though that points over as a Yahoo! product now http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ it’s still really good.
I remember using Google back in the beta days in 1997, before it went ‘live’ live in 1998. But I also remember using MetaCrawler very heavily, which was a meta search engine that at the time searched through Yahoo!, Ask.com and a couple of other different search engines. When I wasn’t using Google, I was using MetaCrawler. Then once Google started hitting just about every search result known to man, I pretty much left MetaCrawler lying in the dust.
Until I read this post I hadn’t really thought about it and decided to check it out again – it now searches Google, Yahoo! Search, Windows Live Search, Ask.com and About.com along with a Yellow Pages/White Pages search option. I think I might play around w/ it again and compare it to some Google searches.
BTW – In answer to the question in the title, I’m not a Google ‘cloud’ freak as I usually only use Google for searching, so if it was to go, I guess I’d head back to http://www.metacrawler.com full time
Although I use Google extensively, yes I could live without it. There are other services that do the same thing, even if I’m not as familiar with them. Especially with problems like the recent Google outage (and then a Google News outage shortly after), it may be something to consider.
Forbes asked a similar question to yours: “The real issue was access to now-vital tools for work and life. And the glaring question was, Have we become too dependent on single large providers of our services?” (as quoted by Newsy)
I encourage our users to use metacrawler, as it combines the top results of all major search engines.
Dogpile.com or uk is my ‘back-up’ search engine. Works pretty well
It is very difficult to live without google because google is a best source of getting information about any thing.
Never used google. Why bother when I can have copernic