Today's New York Times Digital Domain: Everyone Loves Google, Unitl It's Too Big quotes Jeff Atwood, probably based on this post: The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture.
It's interesting that they picked Stack Overflow as an example because even Jeff says:
Now, I don't claim that Stack Overflow is representative of every site on the internet -- obviously it isn't.
I don't know Jeff, I think you're being too modest. This blog doesn't have near the number of visits that SO does, but 95.87% of the search traffic for the last month was from Google. Based on an N of 2 then, I'd say that Google does have a monopoly on Internet searching!
UPDATE (3/5/09):
Is Google an Orwellian nightmare? Yes, Google Is Getting Too Big For Its Britches - Case In Point: Google Health. I'm not so sure. Linking Google's search dominance and the intended use of Google Health in some sort of surveillance conspiracy is a bit of a stretch. If they were related, it would probably just be a clever way to increase ad revenue. It is interesting that many people have a Big Brother fear reaction to the collection of any personal information. Personally BB doesn't worry me nearly as much as all the little thieves out there that would steal my information for their own benefit, at my expense.
