Google confirmed that a variety of its services experienced outages today due to an error which it says caused a "traffic jam," but could today’s outage drive some people to other search engines?

Early this morning users attempting to access Google News saw an error screen message and were unable to view Google’s news aggregator service or search for news until approximately 10 a.m on the East Coast.

But once the news service was back online, Google continued to experience problems with many of its other services including Gmail and YouTube along with its general search function because of what Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of operations for Google says was a glitch that affected 14 percent of users.

Although the search engine giant appeared to have things in hand before noon eastern time, the question remains if any avid Google users abandoned the service for other search engines during the outage and if they will continue using other services.

During today’s outage, Twitter became the go-to spot for news about Google with #googlefail being one of the top trending topics on the micro-blogging service for most of the morning.

While Google released new features this week which many see as efforts to hold off potential rivals, the fact is that the search engine market is heating up with the much-hyped Wolfram Alpha expected to launch later this month and a new search engine service from Yahoo expected to be unveiled later this summer.

A report last month from Nielsen Online found that Google maintained a healthy lead in the search engine world with 64.2 percent of the market share.

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.