Five years ago, Internet traffic was, for the most part, managed by tier 1 providers like AT&T, Verizon, Level 3 Communications, and Global Crossing, all of which connected to thousands of tier 2 networks and regional providers. Today, that has changed. Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic. Among these new Internet superpowers, it’s no surprise to find Google listed. In fact, the search giant accounts for the largest source (6%) of all Internet traffic worldwide.

This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990’s.

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Microsoft’s Bing search engine, after incremental gains in U.S. search engine market share throughout the summer, experienced a slight dip, according to a small number of research firms. Despite that one-month fall in its numbers, Bing has positioned itself for long-term competition with archrival Google, thanks in part to Microsoft’s search partnership with Yahoo.

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The new options on the left side of a regular Google search results page emphasize how important presentation has become in search results.

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Just two weeks after Google Chrome’s birthday, the search engine giant has unleashed Google Chrome () version 3. It’s faster, supports HTML5, and still does not run on the Mac OS.

While the new stable release doesn’t introduce anything groundbreaking (unless you just love custom themes), it does provide some important tweaks. The biggest one focuses on Google’s () #1 obsession: speed. This is Chrome’s () bread and butter. The search company claims that the new browser is 25% faster at executing JavaScript than Chrome V2, among other speed fixes.

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Google Apps education edition is now used by thousands of schools in more than 145 countries around the world, which has increased it’s reach to over 5 million school students. Google also announced growth of 400% in the number of students using Google Apps on campus.

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