I'm with you David! Running my little website requires the help of the search engines, otherwise I'd be writing basically just to hear my own voice, in a sense. Google provides wonderful analytics of your site's activity, for free. Google sends me a lot of my traffic, and those visitors sometimes even make purchases on my site.
Plus, I utilize Google Ads on my site, though they're a mixed blessing for little publishers like me (because they take visitors away from your site). But they do pay for my annual server hosting charges, and a bit more if I'm lucky.
Gmail has been a saviour for me many times. And Feedburner, a Google company, lets me track my site subscribers and manage my email list. Again, for free. There are other alternatives, but I'm not at a point where I can afford or justify them.
Would I manage without Google? Probably. But I like it better with Google. My $0.02.
