europeforvisitors - 4:11 pm on Aug 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

Addendum regarding something the OP said:

My wife left Google over a year ago, she's now a big Ask Jeeves user because it tends to deal with the sort of things she searches for better than most.

I don't think my wife knows there are search engines besides Google (or, if she does, she's never thought of trying them).

Webmasters and SEOs who get mad at Google like to bring up the example of AltaVista as a search engine that "lost the support of the Webmaster community" and was replaced by Google. They forget that AltaVista was never a mass-market brand and household name the way Google is. Heck, "google" is a verb these days. So it really doesn't matter too much whether we use Google for search--what does matter is that the non-technical people around us do, and they aren't any more likely to switch from Google to Yahoo or Ask than a typical Budweiser drinker is likely to switch from Bud to a microbrew.