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According to their official blog, Google says this morning’s outage was caused by a “system error” that rerouted some traffic through Asia, causing a traffic jam.  The bottleneck resulted in GMail, Blogger, and Google itself loading slowly and in some cases being totally unavailable.  Anyone on Twitter knows it caused quite an uproar.  Google has apologized for the error and promises that everything is back to normal now.

This is far from the first outage Google’s had lately and it leads to a very good question.  What are some alternatives to Google’s services?  Here’s a look at a few.

Search Engines

Am I the only one who’s been around long enough to remember life before Google?  At one time Yahoo was the king of the search engines, and it still does a pretty good job.  There’s also AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile, and more.  Beware of any unfamiliar sounding search engines, especially those that claim to be dedicated to a particularly hot topic (like swine flu) as it could be a fake.  Scammers are now creating their own search engines - they look legit but every link is malicious.

Blogging

Blogger is certainly a very popular choice, but there are others out there.  Wordpress.com is probably the best for anyone who’s just blogging for fun, but if you want to monetize your blog you’ll have to look elsewhere.  Good choices include Typepad, LiveJournal, Vox, and if you don’t mind paying for your own hosting, Wordpress.org.

Email

GMail may be king of the hill, but there are many other good alternatives.  Mail.com offers free accounts with 3GB of storage.  GMX offers 5GB of storage.  There’s also good old Yahoo, which offers unlimited storage with its free accounts, and Hotmail, which offers 5GB.  Your ISPs webmail offering may also do the trick as well, depending on how much email you receive daily.

Google’s back up and running now, but it doesn’t hurt to have some back up services ready just in case.  Check them out and let us know what you think!

Read [Google Blog]