Google is the net

When Google is having technical problems (as in this morning) the net feels slow.

That's because, for me, Google is a lot of the net I use - search, Reader, Gmail, Apps, etc.

I'm not the only one (emphases mine):

Coding Horror: The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

... Now that Stack Overflow has been chugging right along for almost six months, allow me to share the last month of our own data. Currently, 83% of our total traffic is from search engines, or rather, one particular search engine:

Search Engine
Visits

Google
3,417,919

Yahoo
9,779

Live
5,638

...

AltaVista
202

...

Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully quaint now. Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the next best so-called "search engine" does. Three hundred and fifty times!..

The shocking thing is that AltaVista still exists! They were the first truly useful search engine, and their fate should forever crush talk of "first mover advantage". I was an early adopter of AV, and I remember the day I gave them up for Google.

Consider this. For the the elite Geeks that visit CH ...

• Google/Live = 600
• Live/AltaVista = 30

I like Google. In terms of doing things that help me, the rank of software companies in my life is basically Google >>> Apple/Microsoft (tied, and Windows 7 might push Microsoft ahead). Still, a wee bit of competition would be good for everyone.