Only a few years ago, Google (News - Alert) accounted for approximately six percent of North America’s Internet traffic. Today, it captures a much bigger slice of that market. A report in WIRED magazine shows that the search engine giant accounts for nearly 25 percent of all consumer Internet traffic across North American Internet service providers (ISPs).

At this rate, it is far bigger than Facebook (News - Alert), Netflix, and Instagram combined.

This explains why Google is building data centers as fast as it possibly can, wrote WIRED reporter Robert McMillan.

The report provides some data collected by Internet monitoring company Deepfield. According to Deepfield’s founder Craig Labovitz, Google has become pervasive in the North American Internet in just the past year. The research shows that over 62 percent of smartphones, laptops, video streamers, and other devices that tap into the Internet from North America connect to Google at least once a day.

The study shows that YouTube (News - Alert) is a big contributor to Google’s Internet traffic. Other contributions to this traffic include searches, analytics, web apps, and advertising.

Obviously, to handle this growth, Google has been building data centers all around the world. In addition, the report indicates that the search engine giant has also been adding thousands of cache servers to ISPs around the world. These servers store the most popular content from Google’s network, so that it can come directly from the ISP’s data center, rather than streaming it all the way from Google’s data center.

According to Deepfield, about three years ago, only a handful of North American ISPs carried these servers. “Today, they’re in 80 percent of them,” said Labovitiz.

However, Google is not alone when it comes to caching. It is becoming a trend. Others on this path include companies like Akamai (News - Alert) and Level 3, who have been using caching servers for a few years now. Lately, Netflix has also embraced this strategy.

The report indicates that Google is reluctant to talk about its global cache servers and ISPs using them. But, Labovitz predicts, this trend is fast catching on, and it will not be long until Internet giants like Facebook and Apple (News - Alert) will begin embedding cache servers.