"How big is the Internet"?
Depends in whether Google is up or not?
Without Google, how do you know where anything even *is*?
-Blake
I have got my local bookmarks. 
Or I just type in Slashdot.org and off to the races. If DNS went down on the other hand, I'd be mowing my lawn.
Pretending that wasn't a troll, I wonder how much of the traffic these days is things like AppleTV, Roku, OS updates, iThing/Android 'Apps', etc. that do not require a user to type "www.bing.com" into the Google search box[*] so they can find the web page.
It's pretty well known that the "hottest searches"
pages put up by the major search engines filter
out the extremely high levels of background noise.
Compare
http://www.google.com/trends/
with
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q
while it's more engaging to show the hottest
searches as being about your favorite actor
or singer, the truth is, those search queries
over any appreciable length of time are
drowned out by the awe-inspiring number
of people typing things like "facebook.com"
into the search box so they can click on the
link to facebook...instead of just typing it
into the URL bar directly. Same with people
searching for yahoo on google, or hotmail on
yahoo. It isn't the cool, sexy data people want
to see, so it gets trimmed out of the "hottest
search" results pages.
darn it. I had something else I was going to
add, but that was 2 hours and two phone
calls ago, and now it's completely gone. 
Matt
Without Google, how do you know where anything even *is*?
ask that to 20% of the world's population
randy
> Without Google, how do you know where anything even *is*?
ask that to 20% of the world's population
Turning off Google is essentially doing a rm -rf http://
www-wide analog to rm -rf / or temporarily loss of the root directory,
pending a fsck.
The important stuff is still there, somewhere... it's just becomes a real
chore to get to your files without a useful directory provided by the
indexing system, until you can get your superblock repaired.
Webcrawler, Gopher sites, and Archie search engine become viable options.
There's also backup on some stacks of tapes somewhere labelled Bing, DMOZ,
Yahoo, and a few other misc. unlabelled stacks, various well-known .COM
and .EDU domains, which you could probably use to find your materials if
you downloaded the old Hosts.txt files; if you look long and hard enough,
you can still find the filesystem data you need to relink the directory
and get at the files you need; it can just be darn inconvenient sorting
out all the spam.
randy
I'm curious; do people really think that the difference in material
indexed between Google, Yahoo/Bing, and others is really that
big? I don't mean the heuristics and algorithms used to return
the results in a particularly useful order; I mean the sheer raw
set of indexed pages. I don't debate that Google found a
particularly useful page ranking system; but I question the
notion that the loss of Google was akin to the loss of your
root directory.
Matt
I disagree categorically with that.
Turning off Google affects at most my use of electric maps--they still have a better setup than any of the others I have tried.
I use Bing, but there are lots of other engines around--some of them a lot more honest.
The scary thing to me is that since most of the medicos I see have gone to an Obamacare-compliant records system and all I see is people's backsides at their computer terminal as they use a Google dialog box for most of what they do.
I don't think the other engines are nearly as badly poisoned by the SEO crap.
I agree. I think its over stated. But I do think there was a more direct
customer-disadvantage outcome, albiet increadibly brief. I think a bunch of
people like me have now got a better sense our always-on backend is
'brittle' even if very very strong, most of the time.
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1376701087982 suggests
it was a disconnection from considerably more than search. I don't believe
index analogies jusify some of the
scaling/visualization/comparison-to-root-dns things, but I would have been
made distinctly uncomfortable in some circumstances by the loss of google
backed email, google drive, and their implicit "no local storage required:
you're always on" behaviour. An example is when I posted some stuff to the
UK from the Post office across from the hotel at IETF, and spend 2 min
online searching google mail for the address. Or, given the new "your
airline ticket on your phone" model, I might have been trying to checkin at
the last 5 minutes onto a flight. Or get into a ball game...
Is this "40% of the net offline" ? no. Was it pretty wide reaching? Yes.