Words: Tom Ward
In the early days of the internet, finding things you actually wanted to look at was a bit of a punt in the dark. Then, the likes of Ask Jeeves, Bing, and Yahoo popped up to help you hop from one page to another. By today’s standards, it was all very charming, jittery, and slow. To begin with, Google was just another search engine. Then, somewhere along the way, ‘Google’ became a verb, and a quarter of a century later, it’s not only the planet’s largest search engine, but a tech superpower, with tendrils in everything from AI to quantum computing. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are centi-billionaires; 25 years in, the company’s influence shows no sign of slowing down.
It all started in 1996 when Page and Brin – two Stanford computer nerds – came up with the idea for a more efficient search engine. They puzzled away at it for two years, before investor Andy Bechtolsheim wrote them a $100,000 cheque. Page and Brin sank the money into an office in the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki, who just so happened to become CEO of YouTube. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and entrepreneur Ram Shriram also served as angel investors in 1998. Page and Brin landed on the name Google.com the same year.
Google’s popularity grew, and an IPO followed in 2004, offering 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 each. The fallout allowed Google a market capitalisation of more than $23 billion. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, and in May 2011 monthly unique visitors to google.com surpassed one billion for the first time. Starting in 2012, Google went on a spending spree, purchasing mapping app Waze, and DeepMind Technologies, as well as founding human longevity company Calico. In 2015 it was announced its various interests would be reorganised under the Alphabet Inc. umbrella. Not every venture has worked out (whatever happened to Google Glass? And RIP to its streaming platform, Stadia) but it was clear that, like Skynet from the Terminator films, Google was becoming all-powerful. Naturally, it’s ascendancy was not free of controversy.
In 2017 Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo arguing that a company-wide bias clouded their thinking on diversity. In 2018, The New York Times published an exposé titled “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’”, before a mass walkout of over 20,000 Google staff, resulting in Google announcing that 48 Google employees had been fired for sexual misconduct over a two year period.
Then, in 2019, the United States Department of Justice announced plans to investigate Google on antitrust violations, leading to a 2020 lawsuit which alleged Google had “abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets.” In January 2021, the Australian Government also proposed legislation, requiring Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their content. Google threw a strop, threatening to take its ball back home, by cutting off search engine access down under. The Australian government fired back, announcing plans to reduce Google’s ability to sell targeted adds, claiming that Google has a market monopoly which harms publishers, advertisers and consumers. Concerns which seem understandable when one considers that, today, Google processes 99,000 searches per second, with 84% of users searching at least three times daily.
With Google products and services from Maps to Docs to Gmail to Google Earth to Chrome in daily use across all of our software, as well as the company having access to search data from billions worldwide, many were asking had its reach gone too far? (Interestingly, when he tried to give up Google for a week, writer Tim Dowling described his immense (and humorous difficulties): “It’s probably fair to say that Google is inescapable, unless you resign yourself to getting nowhere without it,” he wrote. “What is the point of having a computer if you can’t look things up on Google?” The problem is, others can look up things about you, too).
In 2022, for the first time, Google began to accept requests for the removal of personal data including phone numbers and home addresses from it search results. But it would not remove data that is “broadly useful”, including information it says is already part of public record. The debate over how intrusive big tech is allowed to become continues, but when it comes to Google, what do the next 25 years hold? Page and Brin relinquished control of Alphabet in 2019, passing the baton on to Sundar Pichai, formerly of Magic Leap. In a September 5th blog post titled “Questions, shrugs and what comes next: A quarter century of change” Pichai addresses the future, beginning with some ‘gee hasn’t tech come a long way in 25 years’ rhetoric, before bigging up Google’s ‘healthy disregard for the impossible’.
Eventually turning to the future, Pichai writes: “We’re just beginning to see what the next wave of technology is capable of and how quickly it can improve,” pointing to the one million people using generative AI in Google Workspace, flood forecasting technologies, and Google’s AlphaFold database, which Pichai says has implications for tackling problems from antibiotic resistance to plastic pollution.
Pichai also points to Google’s decades-long exploration of AI technologies, in a tone perhaps somewhat defensive to critics who say Google has been left behind by the likes of Chat GPT, which is developed by OpenAI, a subsidiary of Microsoft. As the topic of the hour, it seems remiss that a company that has striven to be at the forefront of tech innovation for 25 years should find itself on the back foot. But not everyone agrees: “I do not really buy into the ‘they missed the boat on AI’ conversation,” Analyst Carolina Milanesi, from the firm Creative Strategies, told the Guardian. “The opportunity for them is in AI both on the consumer and enterprise side.”
So, the next 25 years of Google will surely see a serious foray into artificial intelligence and likely continued work on that other recent tech obsession, the Metaverse. If all of that sounds a bit complex/post human, well, you could always click onto Chrome and Google yourself up a nice pizza to take your mind off it. In the meantime, hopefully they can get Google Maps to work properly, too.
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