Recently some people expressed concern about Google. Should I use Google? Why does Google store a 35 year cookie? Is Google turning evil/becoming a competitor/employing ex-NSA people? None of that matters as much to me as this: I’ve become reliant on Google. I think that I need Google.
Anytime you come to depend on some resource not in your control, you need to put a certain amount of trust into that resource. Trust that it won’t go away, trust that it will always do what you want it do. Trust that it won’t turn icky. All sort of different trusts emerge.
So do I trust Google? Right now, sure, but that doesn’t mean things can’t change. Do I trust Apple? Pretty much, though I do admit to having some mistrust in some of the things Apple does. Do people trust Pyra/Blogger? Many people lost the trust in Blogger’s reliability and jumped ship to Movable Type. In doing this I’d argue that they just exchanged one trust for another, and since it’s still a resource you don’t have complete control over (read the license) it could also go away at some point. (Though you get to keep your data…)
But I’m getting off the subject…
Google is still a great search engine. It almost always seems to find what I need, quickly and easily. That doesn’t mean I won’t continue to look for alternatives, and see what other search engines out there might be doing a good job. I’d hate to have to someday look for an alternative to Google and realize that when I wasn’t looking all the alternatives ceased to exist.
So if someone thinks that blindly trusting that Google (or anything) will always be there for you, and do exactly what you want it to do, well, good luck with that. I, on the other hand, will continue to search out alternatives, other ways of doing things, other tools to get the job done. There’s more than one way do it, you know…