Google hacking was first popularized by Johnny Long, a penetration tester who created a Google Hacking Database that allowed anyone to add interesting security search queries that might turn up vulnerabilities to exploits like SQL Injection or Cross-Site Scripting.
The last decade of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century have seen vulnerabilities like SQL injection make headlines as hackers have stolen millions of credit-card numbers at a time.
Plenty of folks in the cyber security field have debated whether the rise of Anonymous would actually lead to increased spending on services like protection from DDoS attacks, which can temporarily paralyze a website, and SQL injection-type attacks that can raid a database and sometimes purge it of all contents.