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There are a lot of great questions about What would happen if the internet failed semi-permanently and What would happen if electricity stopped working.

As we all know, Google has a great impact on the internet. I'm not only talking about the search engine, Google offers a lot of other services and a lot of computers already depend on Google being alive to work properly, to name one of them: Google's nameservers available under the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. There are probably even more services, which are used by servers all around the world.

So the question is: If Google suddenly disappeared, every server owned by Google shuts down, how big would the impact be on the internet? Would the internet collapse completely as there is just too much which is dependent on Google's services?

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tkausl
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    Hello, and welcome to the site. I'm sorry to be the one to point out that your question is out of scope on this site. Take a look at Is WB a What-If Site?, as well as Risk Factors. This is also a good read: Don't Ask – AndreiROM Jun 16 '16 at 14:25
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    Oh, I thought it'd fit because what if energy stopped working and what if the internet disappeared were great questions and not closed, what's the difference to those two questions? – tkausl Jun 16 '16 at 14:28
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    Wanna join me in chat and talk about it? http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/17213/worldbuilders-general-chat – AndreiROM Jun 16 '16 at 14:31
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    Just a thought - Amazon going dark might be a bigger 'hit' to the internet, given how many companies rely on AWS. – GrandmasterB Jun 16 '16 at 17:59
  • Ask Jeeves is just as good anyways. – coburne Jun 16 '16 at 18:17
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    "Where has Google gone?" would suddenly become the number one search on Bing. – Richard Jun 16 '16 at 19:42
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    What about the impact on the stock market? – Jared Smith Jun 16 '16 at 20:42
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    @GrandmasterB: Maybe. I'm sure Microsoft would be happy for that to happen, since they'd get a lot of new Azure users quite suddenly. But even then, anyone who doesn't keep their production source code in the production environment should be able to recover within a few days, if not that day. – Ellesedil Jun 16 '16 at 21:13
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    I say "Bing it on" – sdrawkcabdear Jun 17 '16 at 00:21
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    Google going down would have catastrophic short-term effects on many websites. Notably: Google Hosted Libraries, Google Custom Search, reCAPTCHA, and Google Maps (as an embed). Many websites would either flat-out not work (using a hosted library with no fallback) or would have degraded functionality (maps not working, etc, etc).

    That being said, all of these are replaceable.

     – TLW Jun 17 '16 at 01:14
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    “Where has Google gone?” has happened before: https://gigaom.com/2013/08/16/five-minute-outage-equals-big-dip-in-internet-traffic/ – Arturo Torres Sánchez Jun 17 '16 at 02:57
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    Believe it or not, but some of us are actually old enough to remember a time before google even existed! I know, sounds hard to believe. I do however remember how nice it was when google arrived to the scene, the alternatives were a joke. – pipe Jun 17 '16 at 10:36
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    No more watching of cat videos on youtube? For more than 5 minutes? Revolution. – gerrit Jun 17 '16 at 13:51
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    @Richard Only if Google is the reason why people aren't using Bing. As anyone who has tried to use Bing can tell you, this is not the reason. ;) – Mason Wheeler Jun 17 '16 at 15:33
  • @MasonWheeler - I presume if Google suddenly collapsed (for some reason), MS could hire all of their search staff and basically recreate google. – Richard Jun 17 '16 at 15:37
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    @Richard I would actually not presume that, as this would require not simply reuniting Google's engineers but also recreating Google's culture. – Mason Wheeler Jun 17 '16 at 15:43
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    @AndreiROM There's one "What if" proposal in the Area51, that will take care of this kind of question... :) – woliveirajr Jun 17 '16 at 19:34
  • @GrandmasterB the Google Cloud Platform also hosts a bunch of sites/applications. Not to AWS's scale, but i'm confident the impact would be noticed as well :p – Patrice Jun 18 '16 at 01:10
  • Reduced censorship, increased democracy – Hack-R Jun 19 '16 at 05:43
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    If Google suddenly disappeared, every server owned by Google shuts down, there'd be both short- and long-term consequences. What types of effects are you questioning? See Enron Is Proving Costly to Economy or Consequences of the ENRON Scandal. But for this, were there any predictors? And are explanations forthcoming? Conspiracy theorists will go wild. Economic confidence in any tech/business? – user2338816 Jun 20 '16 at 05:09
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    Something I would be interested in seeing an answer cover is companies' use of GMail for business. In addition to losing the archive of emails, often this covers address books and calendars. Barring any local copies downloaded via SMTP/IMAP and any in caches, presumably this would bring email communication to a halt and limit any ability to lookup alternate contact details in the immediate term. – kwah Jun 20 '16 at 08:26
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    Google disappeared over here years ago. – martin Jun 20 '16 at 14:16
  • The share price of Alphabet, Inc would drop sharply. – A E Jun 20 '16 at 15:01
  • Google gone: The end of the world as we know it. Google down: Total anarchy and technological withdrawal.........Mass therapy. sessions. –  Oct 28 '17 at 22:30

11 Answers11

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The impact on the Internet would likely be minimal.

Now, don't get me wrong. There would be widespread disruption of service to a lot of people who use Google's services. But the Internet is designed in such a way that the existence of any one node or any one link isn't critical to the network itself. In the modern Internet (as opposed to the original DARPA design) there certainly are nodes that are central to the network, but in terms of the network, Google is more of a leaf node than a central node as they do not provide physical connectivity to any significant number of Internet users. They are (a large set of) end-points, not transit nodes. Google Fiber has on the order of a few hundred thousand users in a small handful of areas; that service disappearing would be an annoyance to those few hundred thousand households who would consequently lose access to the Internet, but would be insignificant to the Internet as a whole.

The first thing that lots of people would notice is probably that anyone who uses Google's DNS infrastructure would find themselves unable to resolve any host names. That's easy to fix: just change back to whatever resolving DNS servers your ISP provides. Takes the tech-savvy person maybe a minute or two once they realize what's happening, but their first reaction would probably be to write it off as a connectivity glitch, not Google disappearing. For the less tech-savvy people, the ISP support departments might be overwhelmed with calls about why everything just stopped working, but it isn't a difficult fix. Once the ISP's support department realizes that Google's DNS servers are having problems (even if they don't know yet what those problems are), they can have their technicians set up a web page, accessible by IP address, explaining what's going on and how to fix it, and place a recorded message to the effect of "if Internet stopped working for you and restarting your computer does not help, then try entering the address 203.0.113.1 into your web browser and follow the instructions there, then call again if doing so does not resolve your problems" early in the call loop, well before the call reaches a human being. (That won't be useful information to everyone, even everyone who has that specific problem, but it will help some, cutting down on the flood of support calls.)

Second, anyone who uses Google's services (search engine, e-mail, etc.) would find themselves unable to access those services. The search engine is probably the easiest to resolve; just use another one. (That Wikipedia article took me about 30 seconds to find, and no, I didn't use Google -- or any other search engine, for that matter -- to find it; just Wikipedia's own search feature.) With how many people store things exclusively in the cloud on other peoples' computers, there would be widespread grumbling in large parts of the world about lost data. Such lost data, if no backups exist, may lead to problems or even bankruptcy for some companies, but that's a problem of having no backups, not of Google disappearing.

But neither of those are critical to the network "Internet" itself.

Your bank's web site will almost certainly keep working just fine. Your local newspaper might be relying on Google infrastructure for their web site, but large national newspapers should be able to quickly get back online if they don't stay online. Content (except that stored on Google's servers) won't suddenly disappear, but it might take some fiddling to establish alternative ways of accessing it (see point on Google's DNS servers above). Stack Exchange would very likely remain online but with reduced functionality as each page gets some Javascript from Google's servers; people should still be able to ask whether unicorns will survive racing through a line of infantry, and read-only access to the important content will work perfectly (I know this because I run NoScript and sometimes forget to turn on Javascript from Google's servers when visiting Stack Exchange...).

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    Well, a term like "the Internet" is used in multiple senses. You could say it means a set of protocols, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc. Or you could say it refers to the cables and wires and switching systems that make up the network infrastructure. But it is also quite reasonable to use it to mean all the data and services that are provided on the Internet. Like if someone says "France", he might mean the land and trees and mountains of a certain geographical area; he might mean the people; he might mean the government; he might mean many things, depending on context. – Jay Jun 16 '16 at 17:04
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    @Jay While you're right that the term "the Internet" is not exacly well defined, this answer is correct regardless of which definition of "the Internet" is in question. For example, Gmail would disappear, but e-mail would continue to function as normal. There aren't many organizations where their sudden disappearance would cause problems for the whole Internet. IANA is one. Maybe ARIN? – Todd Wilcox Jun 16 '16 at 17:31
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    @ToddWilcox ARIN is merely a registry, so their disappearance would cause some disruption of workflow for network operators (in ARIN's area of "jurisdiction", within quotes because they have no legal powers) but none for the general kitten-sharing and unicorn-discussing public. I can't immediately think of any single entity the disappearance of which would cause immediate problems for the public at large in using the Internet. – user Jun 16 '16 at 17:50
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    @Jay By that same reasoning, my personal web site (or for that matter the computer I'm typing this on!) is part of the Internet, but nobody but me really cares all that much if I turn my home PC (or even my home router) off for a while. (Some people might care if I turn the server that hosts my personal web site off, because it also hosts some web sites of a wider interest.) Once we have established that, it becomes simply a question of where you draw the line: My PC doesn't matter, but Google does, so where along that scale does it start* to matter?* – user Jun 16 '16 at 17:51
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    @ToddWilcox Oh, absolutely. I wasn't challenging the overall conclusion. I even upvoted it. – Jay Jun 16 '16 at 18:12
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    @MichaelKjörling Absolutely. I agree with your overall conclusion, I was just nitpicking along the way. As I said in my own answer below, if Google was all kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, millions of people would be inconvenienced for weeks ... and then they'd all adjust. I don't run my own server on the Web, but if I shut down the sites that I run (hosted elsewhere), dozens of people might notice and be inconvenienced for minutes. – Jay Jun 16 '16 at 18:15
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    I may be misunderstanding something, but if Google shut down, people using Google Fiber and Project Fi wouldn't have internet whatsoever, right? Those services are cable/cellular. – Spotlight Jun 16 '16 at 19:34
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    Also, YouTube is owned by Google. Admittedly many people spend way too much time on YouTube and one could argue the world would be better if it weren't there; however, there are individuals who make a living creating YouTube videos. – Robert Benson Jun 16 '16 at 19:44
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    @RobertBenson: for that matter there are people who make a living helping others interpret Google Analytics, or selling apps on Play. Like YouTube vloggers, they are not essential to the network infrastructure. Their jobs will be disrupted or destroyed (as of course will those of Google employees. Vint Cerf his very self might be looking for a new job). But barring total economic collapse and the end of civilisation, the network doesn't care whether or not it can be used for some particular thing involving Google. – Steve Jessop Jun 16 '16 at 22:21
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    Lots of people use Gmail, and that is how they do password resets and things. So a loss of Gmail alone would cause significant disruption for a lot of people. It's kind of like if a major road or freeway is blocked: everyone who needs to go that way is out of luck (happened to me today). –  Jun 16 '16 at 23:07
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    People would use apple maps, then everyone would be lost all the time ;) – VolcanicTitan Jun 17 '16 at 01:38
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    @nocomprende The same thing applies to people who used Lavabit, for example. Email providers come and go all the time. I truly, honestly, sincerely doubt that Google (let alone Gmail) will be around for an infinite period of time. Remember Google's RSS aggregator? – user Jun 17 '16 at 07:33
  • You say that changing back from Google's public DNS to the ISP provided defaults is simple, but without name service how will people find the web page that contains those defaults (assuming they're not set by DHCP)? – eggyal Jun 17 '16 at 11:29
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    @eggyal With the exception of specialized service, most (all?) consumer Internet has IP address, netmask and DNS settings provided by DHCP by default. Using Google's name servers involves changing the DHCP settings on the connection or network interface, on the PC or in the router. A technically knowledgable person will know how to do that, once they realize what the problem is. For the rest, those people will likely dig out their most recent Internet bill and call their ISP's support department to inquire as to why nothing -- web, email, etc. -- is working for them, and can then get help. – user Jun 17 '16 at 11:33
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    Even if the ISP's support department doesn't know what's going on at first, it wouldn't take many different customers calling in with name resolution problems before it starts to dawn on the people in customer support that something is up with third-party DNS. At that point, they can have their technicians set up some sort of temporary solution describing what needs to be done, accessible by IP address, and have a recording early in the phone loop saying "if Internet just stopped working for you, try going to the web address 172.16.0.1 and follow the instructions there". – user Jun 17 '16 at 11:35
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    What about all the Android phones? Would Android even be useful if ALL of Google's servers were killed? You wouldn't be able to sign into your google account on them... – MrCodeWeaver Jun 17 '16 at 14:36
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    @RyanWeaver I have no idea; I don't even own a smartphone. But it still wouldn't really affect the Internet. People, before commenting with counter-examples, please keep in mind what I wrote right near the top: *There would be widespread disruption of service to a lot of people who use Google's services.* (Extra emphasis for clarity in comment.) That sentence has been there since I first posted this answer, and it's as true as it ever has been. Keep in mind the difference between the Internet, and services delivered over the Internet. – user Jun 17 '16 at 17:45
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    SE used to use Cloudflare, now they use Fastly as their CDN. – HopelessN00b Jun 17 '16 at 20:40
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    @RyanWeaver: My phone works just fine even when I have no data connectivity. Or, indeed, any connectivity at all (though then of course I can't make calls :P) You don't need to sign in to Google to use an Android phone. – Lightness Races in Orbit Jun 18 '16 at 15:07
  • "203.0.113.1": the instructions are at http://208.69.38.205 (OpenDNS) – jingyu9575 Jun 19 '16 at 03:21
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    @jingyu9575 203.0.113/24 is one of three blocks that are reserved for use in documentation and examples, so does not imply endorsement of any specific service or party. You would have seen that had you followed the link. (203.0.113.1 that I used as the example is part of TEST-NET-3.) – user Jun 19 '16 at 12:32
  • Plus one for the use of bold, which tells me it's: meh. – Mazura Jun 20 '16 at 00:14
  • Don't underestimate how many developers use google's CDN for scripts on their site, if their CDN went down it could actually break a lot of websites. – Nick Dewitt Jun 20 '16 at 11:09
  • @NickDewitt Temporarily. Those scripts exist elsewhere, so it would be relatively easy to reference them from some other URL. – user Jun 20 '16 at 11:44
  • @michael yes but the website developer would need to fix it before it worked again – Nick Dewitt Jun 20 '16 at 12:11
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Yes, Google is big and provides a lot of services. But it's not like they're the only ones out there providing these services.

If Google suddenly and mysteriously evaporated tomorrow, millions of people would be inconvienced for weeks. Then people would switch to other providers offering comparable services. I don't know of any service that is offerred ONLY by Google, but if there is something, and people care, someone would come along to offer a comparable service.

Bing and other search engines would take up the slack on search engine business. There are hosts of email providers and DNS providers, losing Google would be a drop in the bucket. I don't know an existing alternative to the Google App Store, but if there isn't one, somebody would build one in a hurry. Etc.

I'd guess that within 6 months or so there'd be little noticable remaining effect. People who had valuable data on Google servers that was lost would be harest hit. They might take considerable time to recover. I suppose some businesses that had critical data stored on Google and no backups anywhere else could be ruined.

In real life it's hard to imagine Google simply disappearing over night. If they started losing money it would likely be months or years before they actually went bankrupt. Or whatever scenario you're supposing, people would likely have time to adapt, so when they finally did close up shop, it would be a minor disruption for the few who had failed to prepare. Their servers and software and buildings wouldn't just evaporate: other companies would buy them up.

It's like when US Airways went bankrupt, their planes and pilots and so on didn't all disappear, they were absorbed by other airlines. People who had tickets were inconvenienced, but that's about as far as it went. It's not like it led to an end to all air travel.

Big companies go out of business all the time. It's tough on the employees and investors, but the rest of the world goes on with little notice.

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    The hardest hit would be people who have an Android phone as their only phone and companies hosting mission critical servers only in Google cloud services. Some businesses would never recover. – Todd Wilcox Jun 16 '16 at 17:34
  • Didn't US Airways (at least the airfleet) just become part AAL? – SMS von der Tann Jun 16 '16 at 17:42
  • @SMSvonderTann That's my point. They got bought out, somebody else took over their planes, I assume most of the employees went with the new company, those who didn't mostly went to other airlines, etc. – Jay Jun 16 '16 at 18:18
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    @ToddWilcox Yes. Business who had data on Google, and no backup anywhere else, would be in trouble. If the Web was a big part of their business, they might go bankrupt before they could rebuild it all somewhere else. That would be the worst case. If they had even a short warning that Goggle was going down, presumably they'd quickly make a backup so they could just find another hosting provider and be back up within what, a couple of days? – Jay Jun 16 '16 at 18:20
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    @Jay At the risk of digressing, it can be difficult and time-consuming to pull an entire server off of a cloud service (or put one up). I downloaded a server from Azure one time on a 100 Mb pipe and I just left it overnight to export. A better option with advance notice might be to export any databases, copy those files directly from one cloud service to another, and build new servers on the new service and import the databases/data. Depending on the size of the system, it could be very expensive and time consuming. – Todd Wilcox Jun 16 '16 at 18:45
  • Don't most people have Android phones? (Took me a while, but I finally got one.) If most people are inconvenienced by something, that is a big issue. There might not be a big enough somewhere else for them all to go. That is why "Too big to fail" is a recipe for disaster. (If you needed a recipe, I usually just improvise.) @ToddWilcox I am envisioning large numbers of people all making a rush on the data bank trying to download their stuff before Google's servers closed permanently. Seems... oddly familiar. Maybe the government should back their servers in case of bankruptcy? –  Jun 16 '16 at 23:11
  • My guess is that the main long term result would be that it would be much harder to raise money for technology companies (with a resulting slowdown in internet innovation), as stockholders would take an astonishing loss if Google disappeared (market cap is roughly $500 billion). – user11599 Jun 16 '16 at 23:29
  • @nocomprende Apparently so: 52% android, 40% apple, 8% other. https://www.statista.com/chart/1356/smartphone-market-share-in-q2-2013/ Still, if Android phones quit working overnight with no warning, I presume people would be rushing to the store to buy iPhones and Blackberries and Windows phones. There probably wouldn't be enough phones available to satisfy the demand, and there would be serious inconvenience for months while they ramped up production. Or while some other company got the infrastructure in place to make the Android phones work again. But after a few months, things would be ... – Jay Jun 18 '16 at 17:09
  • ... back to normal. More realistically, Google isn't going to just vanish overnight with no warning. People would see it coming and take precautions. There have been plenty of big bankruptcies of major companies in history. Very hard for the stock holders. Mild inconvenience for almost everyone else. – Jay Jun 18 '16 at 17:11
  • There is F-Droid for free (as in Freedom) software as alternative to the Google Play store. – Michael Jun 19 '16 at 14:36
  • @ToddWilcox Please could you expand on how you think Google vanishing would affect Android phones? Sure, ongoing development would be massively hit. But all existing phones would continue to work, and the source code would still be there for anyone to continue work on. (One of the benefits of Git is that there is no central server for source control.) – Graham Jun 20 '16 at 09:50
  • @graham Ok, maybe not. I don't know enough about the technical details of how the cell phone network works. If all you lost was the Google App Store, and I suppose some level of tech support, etc. So the impact could be even less than I'm supposing. – Jay Jun 20 '16 at 13:22
  • @Jay ToddWilcox is correct about risks if you're using Google to host stuff. There are other options (Amazon is the most obvious) but changing platforms is not a quick job. This could genuinely be fatal for businesses. For phones though, there is nothing which needs Google to be there. If there was, then putting your phone into flight mode (airplane mode) would kill it when you disconnected from all networks. – Graham Jun 20 '16 at 13:44
  • @Graham Hmm, I'm a software developer. I just recently moved several web sites from our own servers to Amazon. It took a couple of days. Sure, a bigger or more complex site might take longer, but I don't see how it could be a show-stopper. If Google went away with no warning and your only backups were also on Google, that could destroy you. If somehow ASP stopped working and you had to port to Java, that could take a long time, but that's not the sort of scenario we're talking about. – Jay Jun 20 '16 at 17:16
  • RE cell phones: I was questioning if Google servers are involved in any way in transmission of cell phone messages. If the answer is no -- and since you brought the question up, that seems a likely answer -- then I agree with your statements. – Jay Jun 20 '16 at 17:17
  • @Jay I'm a software developer too (although not web-based). It's not so much who hosts the website, it's about who's got your data. Where's your database of orders and customers and stock? If it's still in house, you're OK. But if you're reliant on Google hosting that too, and Google vanishes overnight, then you can't ever get that data back. From what I know about stats of companies where they lose that, it's nearly always fatal for small companies. Larger companies can generally fight back, but they're massively weakened. – Graham Jun 21 '16 at 10:12
  • @Graham Sure, if Google literally vanished into the mists overnight like Brigadoon, companies that had all their data on Google servers and no backup anywhere else would be in serious trouble. But real life rarely happens that way. The servers won't literally vanish. A realistic scenario would be that Google would announce they're shutting down this service and give clients some period of time to get their data off. Maybe not, of course. We'd have to know more details of the hypothetical scenario. Seriously, big as Google is now, I presume they will go out of business SOMEDAY. – Jay Sep 10 '18 at 21:00
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If Google were to disappear then the other search engines would all have an opportunity to become the new Google, it's likely that eventually one of them would win, be it Bing, Yahoo, or Duckduckgo.

It's very likely that the winner would probably be more nefarious and less fair about their search engine results as well, because Google do tend to be quite unbiased and equal opportunity.

As for the ramifications of all of Google's servers disappearing, I'm sure a fair few people would be very upset about losing their sites and their online documents (I know my company would lose a lot), but it would be quickly replaced by the next best thing.

In conclusion: Google going down would mess up the internet for a few days for the average person, whereas the issues could be potentially lethal for a lot of companies that rely heavily on search engines.

user20008
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  • Hi user20008. Please keep in mind the difference between the network Internet, and services offered on top of that network (such as the World Wide Web), and services offered on top of that (such as the Google search engine, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia or what have you). – user Jun 16 '16 at 16:37
  • Isn't Duckduckgo just a website that googles (and searches on Bing, Yahoo and so on, but basically googles)? If Google doesn't exist anymore, does Duckduckgo still work? – palsch Jun 16 '16 at 20:50
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    @palsch According to them "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes)". ( https://duck.co/help/results/sources ) Having their own crawler - the service should be self-sufficient, even if other search sources disappeared - though the relevancy and volume of the results could be affected. – killercowuk Jun 17 '16 at 08:59
  • "it's likely that eventually one of them would win, be it Bing, Yahoo, or Duckduckgo." You should probably know that Yahoo search is powered by Bing. It's been that way for 7 years or so. – MiniRagnarok Jun 17 '16 at 19:07
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    Downvoted because I don't think that "Google tends to be quite unbiased and equal opportunity". OMG LOL – Kii Jun 17 '16 at 22:19
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    "Google tends to be quite unbiased and equal opportunity". That's irony, right? Google spies you to give you the results that it thinks you will prefer. That's completely biased, and usually it does it wrong for me. That's why I use DuckDuckGo. – Oriol Jun 18 '16 at 22:25
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Essentially nothing.

In fact, Google has already disappeared for almost 20% of the world's population. All of Google's (including Android) services are completely blocked in China, along with Facebook and a number of other highly popular Western web services.

While technologically competent tourists are able to use SSH and VPNs to bypass such blocks while there, overcoming these blocks, a fluorishing local internet ecosystem has sprung up to cater for the niche of services provided by Google and Facebook. These, in addition to the competitors of Google in the Western world, can also take its place easily.

Such websites include Baidu (China's number one search engine), WeChat/Weixin (China's Facebook equivalent) can all take over the parts of Google that are already in use. While the transition may take a few days to complete, it is unlikely that any significant lasting effects will occur as users transition to alternative services.

In fact, it is possible that overseas equivalents will evolve and take over Google's niche faster than their Western competitors, due to the fact that the necessary infrastructure is already fully in place and running.

For example, Youtube receives web traffic that is orders of magnitude higher than any of its Western competitors, and Google has an immense amount of network infrastructure in place to support that traffic. It would probably take weeks to months for competitors such as Vimeo (which has less than 3% of Google's userbase) to expand their infrastructure to handle the hordes of cat video watchers, while overseas competitors such as Youku from China (~50% of Google's userbase) or NicoNico (Japan) will likely have infrastructure better equipped to handle the massive influx of users.

March Ho
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Google is HUGE, and provides many services, but the Internet was designed during the Cold War to survive a nuclear Armageddon. It would still be there, but with a significant reduction in cat videos et al. via YouTube. (Along with all other services that Google provides.)

Secondarily and tertiary effects would have major effects in the business sector, so there would be significant economic disruption. Local governments and academic institutions which use Google as an email and storage service would suffer, many documents would be lost and communication would effectively be disabled until they switched too other services or provided it themselves like in the old days.

There would be mass emotional distress, and fear.

Android phones wouldn't be much better than dumb phones, with most services disabled and no more updates.

To some, it might seem like the world ended.

Then everyone would buy iPhones and use Bing, and be okay.

Of course, if you bring Google Fiber into the picture, that's a different matter. It is the Internet for some. And that depends on how closely integrated/dependent Google's services is with its hardware. And how proprietary its hardware is. If it's hardware is fully independent and standardized, it will simply be absorbed into the Internet. All other outcomes depend on how many trained personell remain who are specialized in Google's tech, and the depth of integration services (including Google's private services only they know about) have with hardware. The less independent, the more Google Fiber comes crashing down. So the Internet via Google Fiber would end in that case in areas only serviced by Google Fiber. (None of those exist, yet.) And yet, another provider would just run a line out there. Hopefully the cellular networks aren't plugged solely into Google Fiber in that case!

NonCreature0714
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  • Ironically, this exact situation actually happened today inTexas with ATT!!!! Even their cell towers have degraded/disabled service for Internet related services! – NonCreature0714 Jun 18 '16 at 01:13
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You have to realize that Google as a cloud service provider is relatively modest. Modest in the sense they are still top 5, but that in this particular area Amazon is dominating real hard with about a third of the world's market share.

Cloudtacular!

Amazon has clients such as NASA, Netflix or the freaking CIA. Losing Amazon would have a much more substantial impact that losing Google.

The biggest impact the disappearance of Google would probably be purely economical. On the stock market first, Alphabet's market cap is (currently) 492.02 billion USD, which is about the GDP of Sweden, i.e. loads of money to have disappeared suddenly.

Alphabet (which is Google's parent company in case you didn't know) also owns venture capital funds invested in various company. The disappearance of that would hit companies funded by Alphabet pretty hard.

Beyond that, any service is replaceable. Consumers would likely only lose data, which is kind of a bummer but not the end of the world (and a valuable life lesson about the volatility of The Cloud™ and how local saves are important).

Companies relying on Google/Alphabet services would lose vasts amount of money and those unable to find an alternative quickly would fold.

The Internet itself would shrug it off and find another video streaming service where to downvote Call of Duty trailers.

user
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AmiralPatate
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For the internet as an infrastructure nothing would change at all.

For the community called Internet(s) only minor changes would happen.

  • Youngsters wouldn't understand UTFG prompt, something like "dial" word for the phones nowadays;
  • Youtubers would lose their "jobs" and start the real ones;
  • Android phones would become scrap or Canonical/Mozzilla would ressurect their Ubuntu/Firefox over Android projects;
  • Zounds of Ultimate compilations of anything would disappear, thus procrastination would become harder, for a while;
  • People will start using dedicated tools instead of one G-stuff;
  • many StackExchange users would lose their reps and badges because htey would need to create brand new accounts;
  • People relying on google only will learn the words "Diversification (of risks)" the hard, painfull and expensive way.

And for the world and reality? Some people would commit suicide, some would die of laugh. The others would get used to the change.

Crowley
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  • Android phones with the exception of flagship devices usually are considered scrap the minute they leave the store, they're referred to as 'landfill android' for a reason... – James Snell Oct 20 '16 at 15:06
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There would be chaos for a while at least. It's actually part of an experiment that I've been working on to see how it affects me personally.

A number of very large and critical pieces of infrastructure rely on google's datacentres such as the UK Tax service HMRC and there are probably parallels in most countries, so basic things won't happen. In the USA they have Google apps for Government. Killing that stuff off is going to have a huge effect on people who don't even own a computer or smartphone...

Even as a normal user, one can easily choose not to use google search & mail but their hold on the internet as we use it daily is deeply insidious. Take googleapis, googlefonts - those are not sites we normally visit directly, but block them at your firewall and you'll soon know about it. a number of third-party sites will just point-blank refuse to work properly. Then you get into the included content (google maps, embedded youtube videos which carry things like user training.)

If you want to experiment then you can obtain a list of google IP ranges and just block them at the firewall. I'll give you 10 minutes of trying to get a normal day's surfing done before you have to undo them.

James Snell
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Interestingly, there was a video posted by Tom Scott recently about what might happen if someone in Google disabled passwords on all accounts one day, and what would happen to the rest of the internet if Google dropped off the net due to something like that.

Spoiler, in a few hours the whole internet falls over. But then not long after everyone goes back to business as usual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q&feature=youtu.be

Aaron Lavers
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As other answers have said, Google going away will ahve almost no impact on the Internet. It will have a very large impact on the Internet services people commonly use.

Other answers have already covered the big pieces, but one aspect that's been missed in a lot of the answers is the less-visible infrastructure services Google supplies. Most will be only a temporary disruption, but many mean a large and permanent loss of data.

Google Sign-In

You can log into many sites using your Google account. Suddenly, you can't. Recovery of that account will be almost impossible because your [email protected] is also gone. This also effects many Android and iOS apps and many devices.

Hosted Javascript Libraries

Google hosts a lot of popular Javascript libraries like jQuery and AngularJS which web sites directly link to. When Google disappears, all those web sites will stop working or work at greatly reduced functionality. Fortunately, this is easy enough to fix by replacing the link with another library host, or your own local copy. A few days of web spread chaos on the web while this gets fixed, but it's a trivial fix.

Maps

Many sites and applications rely on Google Maps. For some it's non-critical functionality ("directions to my restaurant"). For others it's critical. There are plenty of other map services out there, but with different APIs. Changing the code to use them is fairly easy, but not trivial.

YouTube disappears

On the one hand it is a temporary disruption as there are plenty of other video services out there. More importantly is the loss of all the videos only on YouTube. The loss of artistic and cultural content will be very large.

Chrome Browser

Google's browser has about half the market share on all platforms, including smartphones. With Google gone, it will no longer be updated making it vulnerable to security problems in the short term.

While large portions of the browser are Open Source, much of it is not. A significant effort would have to be made to reconstruct the original code, and rebuild a development team. However, there's a question of whether that would be legal.

Fortunately, there are other browsers to step in and take Chrome's place.

Google Contacts, Drive, Docs, and Keep

There are other services which provide a similar product, but like with YouTube, all your documents in Contacts, Drive, Docs, and Keep are now gone. If you didn't have them locally mirrored, they're lost forever. Everything from slide shows to budgets are gone.

Android

Many people have stated that Android phones will become scrap. I don't believe this is true. All the basic functionality will still work: voice calls and text messages. All apps which have locally cached content should still work: contacts, calendar, even maps if you turn on local caching. Non-Google apps will continue to work fine... assuming they don't rely on Google Sign-In or Google APIs.

Alternative Android stores already exist. Android users and app providers can switch to using them. Critical apps like Maps, Contacts, and Calendar will have to be updated or replaced to use working APIs.

Android itself, like Chrome, is mostly Open Source. But there's critical pieces which are not. However, there are already Open Source versions of Android ready to go, such as CyanogenMod.

Google Voice

Anyone using Google Voice probably just lost their ability to make and receive calls and texts, since that is all routed through Google. They also lost all their text and voice mail archives probably forever.

Fortunately, they should be able to transfer their number to a new provider. It might take some time if Google truly disappeared to get the number unlocked.

Schwern
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Not much to add but Google ads bring a lot of revenue to small businesses.

people study how to make their site appear higher in the search results of google on certain topics.

There are companies that have staff just doing that.

The process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and although the title seems generic, many of these "practices" are concentric to how google gives your page to a user.

Other search engines may use the information provided by SEO in a very different way.

It may take weeks to train staff to rethink their optimizations.

There are still many places today that don't have access to internet. many people who do, use cellphones likely for BBM/whatsapp as their primarily internet usage.

Interesting Fact

This document on pages 56 & 57 show that in South Africa in 2015 only 10% of people use internet at home or even have access to it there and another ~50% or so have access by other locations (work /school/ university)

So I say some places will be hit harder than others but a sudden disappearance of google will only cause a temporary hurdle to many people/industries.

(Although I also think some people would give up using the internet XD)

Sarfaraaz
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