In one of our editorials, Welcome to the Google twilight zone!, we invited you to imagine how the world would look like without Google.

Well, yesterday Google "offered" us the chance to see for ourselves. According to the official statements, for 15 minutes, during 6:45 and 7:00 PM Eastern Time, Google was down. And we I say Google was down, I mean the entire range of services: Gmail, Google News, Froogle.

Although David Krane, the company's spokesman, said the servers were down for 15 minutes, several users didn't have access for approximately 45 minutes.

During this time, anyone who typed in www.google.com was redirected to SoGOSearch.com or other pages, convincing many that Google was defeated by hackers.

In reality, it seems it was a DNS problem, or at least that's what David Krane said for Mercury News , stressing the idea that there was no security or hacking issue. This might be true, since many users reported they could access Google's services by typing in the IP address of the search engine.

The cause of this problem is still unknown. Some say it was and error generated by Google Web Accelerator, others are convinced this was successful hacking attack.

Considering Google's discretion regarding its products and services, it remains to be seen if an official statement with more details will be released.