Google died at the weekend. Well, google.com did anyway, as did co.uk, .fr, and seemingly all the other regional variants of the world's most popular search engine. As Neowin reported at the time, the site was down for less than an hour for most users - but responses posted here and at other tech sites to the news showed just how lost users felt without a search engine which has become part of their lives.
Google's blaming a DNS problem for its sudden disappearance of the web. But what happens when such a site goes down - something so many web users have come to rely on? Not only Google was affected; Gmail, its free webmail service, disappeared off the face of the net at the same time. Users who had bookmarked the IP address for the site were still able to access it - but for everyone else, there was no Google. Yahoo!, once again, became the search engine of choice for many - after, of course, they tried to use Google to find out what was wrong with, erm, Google.
This shows just how dangerous it can become to rely on one source. OK, so it's not likely that Google will suddenly have massive debts, go into liquidation and disappear altogether tomorrow. However, it's always a possibility that things could change very rapidly on the net - remember, there was one time Netscape was seen as the browser of choice, a situation many envisaged lasting forever. The sheer volume of the outcry from surfers trying to use the site - which, depending on your own DNS, was down for as little as 15 minutes - shows the affect one collapse or disappearance can have. This instance wasn't related to DNS poisoning; however, if such a situation happened in the future, it's clear that many users would, quite simply, be lost.
One of the issues thrown up by the sudden collapse, however, was the problem of auto-URL checkers built into many browsers. In particular, Safari is going to draw criticism here; Mac fanatics, please put away your flames.
