What the world would be like without Google
Ionut has an interesting post about what the world would be like without Google. I agree that the Internet would be quite a bit different than it is today. I wonder what points will be added to this list ten years from now?
Context & Ripple Effects
The post rides a mid-2006 wave of treating Google as infrastructure rather than a website: CNN ran "Imagining the Google Future" back in February 2006, and Ionut's counterfactual list published the same day extends the exercise to everyday services — starting with the mail account. What makes the hypothetical land is timing: within the past month Google launched a one-stop federal government search product (June 2006) and began testing auction-style sales of print advertisements (announced February 2006), so the company's footprint already stretched well beyond the search box.
The dependency argument also had fresh anecdotal fuel — discussion around the July 2006 Gnomedex conference found Google the most talked-about company among attendees despite sending no employees at all. Eric Schmidt's June 2006 insistence that Google is a "serious" company despite trinkets, pets and bouncy-ball chairs reads as the same perception battle from the other side: a playful brand being taken seriously enough that writers debate what its absence would break.
First-order effects
- Users confronting the list find their defaults enumerated across four layers at once — mail, web search, the new federal government search product, and an emerging print-ad marketplace — so the counterfactual is no longer just about losing a search engine.
- At Gnomedex, Google's complete absence alongside its dominance of conversation gave the thought experiment a live audience: attendees were already discussing a company that wasn't in the room.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and advertisers watching Google's print-ad auction test have a direct stake in the answer: an ad channel Google intermediates would need some other mechanism to clear if the company disappeared.
- Federal sites surfaced through Google's June 2006 government search product would need a substitute front door, turning a consumer convenience into a procurement problem for public information access.
Third-order effects
- If one intermediary becomes the assumed layer under mail, search and advertising, its absence stops being a product-substitution question and becomes an infrastructure question — the framing both CNN's February piece and Ionut's list independently reach for.
- Schmidt's effort to reconcile the playful-office image with the company's expanding role signals a broader tension: the more essential the company becomes, the harder the whimsical brand is to sustain alongside systemic responsibility.
The trend: Commentary in mid-2006 marks the turn from evaluating Google as one search engine among many toward stress-testing it as removable internet infrastructure — with the company's own expansion into government search and print ads accelerating the reassessment.