[zarify]

"And say we don't have a replacement. Say we just have Altavista-level search technology. How much of your daily internet usage is still possible?"

Possible? Sure. But I have pretty clear memories of searching through _many_ pages of results in Altavista. I have very few memories of searching for things in Google, which arguably is the point.

It's interesting that the argument being made against Google here is much the same argument that fans of Google often make against Apple :) I think there's plenty of merit to saying that Google is a pretty amazing technology company purely because we don't have to think about what we use their products for, which in turn lets us use them more (whether that be navigation, search, etc).