Google to be offline for 48 hours?

Posted on: Friday, August 8th, 2008

Google is re-booting its massive server structure tomorrow in order to improve performance and also strip out all dead links.

Of course this isn’t happening but what would happen if Google (and even other search engines) went offline for any extended period of time? I for one would be left without at least 7 services that I feel are vital to my business:

Google Search
Google Analytics
Google Maps (iPhone Version)
Google AdSense
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Mail
and even iGoogle

Of course these all have varying importance to my business but Gmail and Search I would definitely miss, and so would my customers. As someone that works in SEO and web design I target most of my time at getting rankings in Google as it has over 70% of all daily searches and is so important that it has entered the English dictionary.

Google Analytics :- I lose the ability to monitor all of my sites traffic and therefore do not know how to target my resources to improve the rankings in search results.

Google Maps :- I get lost or have to remember Duke of Edinburgh training in how to read maps and compasses.

Google AdSense :- I lose 20% of my daily total income

Google Webmaster Tools :- I lose track of crawl data and site map data (of course this doesn’t matter if Google Search is down)

Google Mail :- I lose all of my archived email that I no longer store locally, aggghh wake up call.

iGoogle :- Yes this is the least important but its still so convenient to store all my feeds in one place, and I use it to monitor comments on my blogs too.

So in conclusion: We rely so heavily on some web based applications that the ramifications worldwide would be huge if such a thing as Google going offline ever happens, maybe we should have some sort of contingency for this, or maybe just maybe this will never happen….

Here’s hoping…

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