This is a blog post about Google

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

No, this is not the introduction to a tragic young adult’s novel; this is a blog post about Google.

To give you some background, China has a penchant for blocking various western websites, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wenxuecity (haha) to name a few. This is known to the internet as “The Great Firewall of China.”

Now I’m not exactly new to this phenomenon, I totally knew that once I got here I would lose all access to anything Google, but what I was not ready for was the realization on how much of my web crawling life was spent on Google and its affiliates.

Things that I knew I wouldn’t be able to do:

1.       Upload blog posts (blogger is run by Google)

2.       Google things

3.       Watch Youtube

4.       Check gmail

Things that took me by surprise:

1.       Googling things – But wait what, you just said you were prepared for this. Yes, I was. But what I didn’t come prepared for was the fact that typing into the address bar didn’t direct me to search results but instead to “This webpage is not available.” And you don’t really realize how often you use the search bar either until every time you look up something you have to backspace it all out and type bing.com (“How could you? Bing is the devil!” I couldn’t help it; Microsoft did some pretty hardcore advertising that somehow convinced me that it was the 2nd best search engine).

2.       Google translate – Tohoku University (the place I’m studying abroad at this semester) occasionally sends me entire emails in Japanese. Since my current understanding of Japanese is equivalent to probably a formal lower elementary school level, I decided to skip the trying and just run it through Google translate. AHA, BUT YOU CAN’T. You got me. I backspaced and used Bing translate. (Though I just Binged “translate” and it turns out that Bing has Google translate embedded in its search, so I could’ve just done that). (Fun fact, Googled does not get squiggled as a word, but Binged gets a grammar squiggle.)

3.       No Google hangout – Can’t send messages through hangout (or video call for that matter). Must use wechat.

4.       Links to Google docs/embedded Youtube videos – Totally forgot that the rest of the U.S.A. also uses google profusely.

Good thing this ban ends once I get to Japan. Free VPN is totally not worth it.