"imagine you woke up tomorrow and there was no google". So you mean there would be no analytics (something gizmodo probably uses), no gmail, no google docs, no code.google.com and on top of it I would have to use Bing! That seems like apocalypse to me.

Having a single privacy policy is not that bad. Surely, we need to be wary of google overreaching, but the world is still better off with google than without it.