Life without Google: Oz facing the unthinkable

Imagine a world without Google, the search engine so pervasive it's the starting point for more than five billion queries a day. That's the reality facing Australia, where the tech giant is threatening to unplug its homepage in a standoff with the government.

Google opposes a planned law that would force the company and Facebook Inc. to pay Australian publishers for news content. The Internet juggernaut's ultimatum to local lawmakers— change the legislation, or else—has left a digital vacuum hanging over a nation that essentially knows just one way to navigate the web. Google runs 95 per cent of Internet searches in Australia.

Potential fallout from the spat goes far beyond Australia for Alphabet Inc-owned Google, whose dominance of global advertising has made it a target for watchdogs worldwide. If the company backs down in Australia, the pay-fornews law risks becoming a template for jurisdictions, including Canada and the European Union that are following the quarrel and keen to shorten Google's lead.

But disabling what is arguably the world's most famous website would hand all of Australia to rivals, including Microsoft Corp's Bing and DuckDuckGo, which have failed to dislodge Google as the gateway to the web. These search-engine competitors would suddenly have a playground for development and a foothold to advance on the global stage.

Software-engineering student Patrick Smith exemplifies Australia's Google dependency. The 24-year-old from Canberra said he sometimes racks up 400 Google searches a day to help with his studies, catch up on news and look up recipes. Smith said his browser from the previous day shows 150 searches—in the space of just five hours.

"The prospect of Google search disappearing is frightening at best," Smith said. "It's quite reflexive of me to Google something, anything, that I'm even mildly not sure of."

Searching for 'best beach Sydney' shows the variance in performance among Google's competitors. DuckDuckGo's first result was an ad for a hotel more than 1,000 kilometres away in Queensland. Search Encrypt, which touts its data-protection capability, said: 'It looks like there aren't any great matches.' Bing suggested Bondi Beach Post Office. Only Google returned a real beach, Bondi, first up.

The world-first legislation is still being debated in Australia's parliament and a report on the law from a key senate committee is due Friday.