Google is the second most valuable company in the world after Apple. Worth $688 billion, if it were a country, it would rank 19th in gross domestic product, ahead of Switzerland and Argentina.
THE WILD WEB
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in the mid 1990s. At that time, the world wide web held around ten million documents, with no clear way to search them. Page was studying the links between pages on the web as part of a research project he called ‘BackRub’. Brin was interested in data mining. Together, they worked on the project in Page’s dorm room, building a new kind of search engine.
Housed on the Stanford website, this search engine quickly became popular among students and its use was extended to all internet users. A few years later, over one hundred thousand searches were conducted every day. Page and Brin decided to set up a company. They got funding from family and friends, bought some servers and rented a garage in Menlo Park.
one hundred zeros
On the 4th of September 1998, the team founded Google with a mission to “make the world’s information accessible and useful.” Its name is an adaptation of the word ‘googol’, a number consisting of a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. One theory suggests that it was a misspelling when the domain name was registered.
WAYS OF WORKING
The company was a success. It moved to an office in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley in 1999, and started selling advertising. Continued growth had the company moving into bigger and bigger premises, until finally settling in Mountain View, on a site that would become known as the Googleplex.
the google campus
The Googleplex, laid out like a university campus, set a new standard for young technology companies. Its casual style and focus on innovation and creativity became typical of tech giants like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. Featuring green spaces, solar panels and free bikes to get around, these new structures marked a turning point from the previous generation’s clinical corporate culture.
epic wins and epic fails
Over the following years, Google ventured into new areas, with varying success. From social media and healthcare to renewable energy, its willingness to ‘take a shot’ has never abated. One of its most astute acquisitions was that of Android, putting it in direct competition with Apple. It also bought YouTube in 2006 and three years later launched Gmail, which now boasts over a billion users.
However, Google has made some bad bets, too, such as Google+. Created as an alternative to Facebook, it never really took off. Google Glass, offering smartphone functionality embedded in a pair of glasses, was also a short-lived venture.
IS GOOGLE GOOD?
From maps and translations, to file storage on the cloud, Google has become ingrained in our everyday lives. The name itself has become a verb, included in the dictionary. Nowadays, we talk of ‘googling’ something. Its size and influence gives it great responsibility, too, and concerns have been raised about its impact on society.
While the search engine has undoubtedly made life easier, we no longer need to remember anything. According to some researchers, because of Google, we accept fake news and have shorter attention spans. They believe this will lead to impaired memory function. There are privacy issues, too, as well as criticism over the use of filters. Google presents results based on our search habits, which can lead to a narrow view of the world.
the future of big tech
Whatever the opinion, Google keeps innovating in virtually all areas of life that can be touched by technology. Brin himself said it is impossible to predict where it will lead. What is certain is that the company will continue to shape the future for many years to come.
Life in the digital age
Google has always been at the forefront of the digital revolution, but even its creators cannot predict the future. Speaking at the World Economic Forum last year, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin talked about the difficulties the company had when it first tried to branch out into the field of artificial intelligence with a project called Brain.
Sergey Brin (mild Russian accent): When I was heading up Google X a few years back, and one little project we had in there, which is now called Google Brain, which was this AI effort ... But I didn’t pay attention to it at all, to be perfectly honest. And having been trained as a computer scientist in the nineties, everybody knew AI didn’t work... And fast-forward a few years and now Brain probably touches every single one of our main projects, ranging from search, to photos, to ads. To everything we do...
TIME TO THINK
Advances in technology are helping us, but replacing us at the same time. Brin says that this provides us with the opportunity to think about our place in the world.
Sergey Brin: I think a lot of folks are correctly forethinking, taking some of those innovations for granted and then saying, “Well, what does that mean for society?” and so forth. I think that ‘s the right thing to do. I think AI is the continuing of the automation that we’ve seen in the past two hundred years and how that evolves society and economy and social order … That’s the smart thing to do. I don’t think that’s sort of impossible somehow, but it deserves a lot of thought. If some of the burdens of day-to-day life that have been increasingly alleviated through technology, through agriculture and so forth … maybe that leaves us free to really think a little bit more deeply about who it is we are and what it is we seek.
KEEP TRYING
Brin believes that much of the continued success of Google and other Silicon Valley companies is down to the traditional factors of luck and persistence.
Sergey Brin: There’s a huge amount of luck there. But the luck also comes from taking many shots. You, know, if I told you all the dumb things that I did ... So many failures! I think we’re just lucky that we have the environment that tolerates making lots of risky bets and tolerating the failures that inevitably result.
GLOBAL DREAMERS
The risky bets that paid off have transformed our lives. Young people these days face different challenges, says Brin.
Sergey Brin: I think young people, in some ways, their life is much easier. We can whip our phones out and look up anything and figure out how to get somewhere. There are a lot of affordances that are such conveniences today that make it easy. But there is also a global stage that makes it hard. I would encourage young folks to take chances and pursue their dreams.