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Shortly after this I got a phone call from the person, who told me that they couldn't find that page.

I repeated the URL and, since they were on a dial-up connection, they wrote it down and hung up to go back online.

A couple of minutes later, the phone rang again. It seems that they still couldn't find the page.

Fearing something was wrong, I also keyed the URL into my browser and much to my relief, the page popped up immediately.

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I got the person on the other end of the phone to read back the URL letter by letter. No problems - they certainly had it 100% right - so what was going on?

"What error message are you getting when you try to access the page?" I asked.

I was told that their browser displayed "Sorry, no information is available for the URL".

It was then that the penny dropped.

This person had been keying the URL into Google's search query box.

When I suggested that they type the URL into their browser's location/URL field they went silent and were obviously confused.

It turns out that this person had Google as their browser start-up page and did all their web-surfing by keying stuff into the query field. The browser's URL input field was a foreign concept to them.

Yes, believe it or not, there are a growing number of people out there for who Google is their only gateway to the web.

Of course, given Google's overwhelming dominance of the search-engine marketplace, this is hardly surprising - but it is a worry.

Imagine just how devastating it would be to any website that gets off-side with Google and finds themselves removed from or strongly demoted in Google's rankings.

I strongly suspect that there are many millions of web surfers who don't even realise that there are other excellent search engines out there (apart from Google and Yahoo!) that may provide better or alternative results for their searches.

I sometimes check out the results that Teoma throws up, and even good old AltaVista occasionally spits out a gem or two that Google hasn't ranked very highly.

It would appear however, that Google's comprehensiveness and ability to rank websites with authority has made many websurfers lazy. When was the last time you used multiple search engines to track down some information for example?

To date, Google has behaved like a responsible entity, drawing clear lines between search results and advertising - while appearing to use fair and ethical methods for ranking its results.

I sure hope that their beancounters don't decide to get greedy - imagine the effect this would have on the way so many accessed the web (shudder).

But is there any real challenger to Google's might?

Are there any up-and-coming search engines that offer real benefits over the current king of query?

Please share your own findings with the rest of us.

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