> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged. Jeff

> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged. Jeff missed a major point here. What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant. Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying. The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.