Today while discussing the Air India strike during Lunch hour we chanced to discuss a scenario if all Search Engine go on strike. What will happen to our lives??
It’s theoretically impossible for that to happen but just by chance if all the servers shut down some day what will happen. I am sure the mass of India would remain unaffected but considering the usage of Google worldwide, I can imagine a mini dark age to be dawn on the netizens.
Trying to find the how much the world uses search engine I went to http://www.google.com/trends . The statistics generated there is mind boggling. The usage of Google for education/work/entertainment has virtually created a matrix of its own. Imagining a day without this matrix means a virtual shutdown of an important part of life.
Just imagines all Search Engines goes on strike on a Saturday. I won’t be able to get quick references to websites, phone numbers, address etc and would be completely lost in World Wide Web.Now imagine this for everyone. It will be a virtual dark age minus all online communication. A part of your identity will stop functioning. But there is a catch. This will probably give the time to use our brains whose grey matters are slowly replaced by Google search. Today thoughts and memories are dependent on Google search engines. So without the search engines we would struggle on many aspects of our lives.
The web now has become so large and complex that without search engines we will be lost in the labyrinth of words and images and videos. The search engines are the torch to search our way through this maze of information. So without this torch we are doomed.
Honestly I would like to see the actual affect of this scenario. I am sure no company will shut its server down for this kind of social experiment which amounts to losses of millions of USD. But we should ponder over this scenario. The dependency on a virtual network has grown so much over the last 5 years that the question arises “Are we ready for Search Engines, if it decides to go on strike”??
