The rise and rise of Google
Internet giant Google is celebrating its 20th birthday. The company was incorporated on September 4 1998, but has chosen — for reasons that cannot be found by searching the internet — to celebrate its birthday on September 27.
Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, entered the competitive internet search market as university upstarts and ended up dominating it. They did this by inventing something called “page ranking”, an algorithm which vastly improved the quality of results achieved when searching.
As with most megacompanies, Google has its own story of lost corporate opportunity. Brin and Page offered to sell Google to Excite for $1m in 1999. Excite’s CEO, George Bell, turned them down, even when they sheepishly cut the price to $750,000. Five years later, Google’s listing would value the company at $23bn. Its market capitalisation is now in excess of $820bn.
The search engine has been relentlessly refined and expanded and can now quickly tell you the etymology of words or the financial details of a listed company or the schedule of your favourite sports team, although the latter carries a heavy US bias.
Google is no longer just a search engine. It owns YouTube and has mapped the world down to a photographic street view with Google Maps. Google Earth, Google Books and Google Drive have added new services to its offering.
Google has always claimed it provides a public service, connecting the world’s digitised information to its online citizens to empower them and to make it a better place – or, perhaps, a better understood place.
But has it lived up to its “anticorporate, no-evil philosophy”? For one thing, it is now itself a giant corporation which some view with suspicion. Its eager young coders are paper millionaires who must please themselves and legions of shareholders with ever-improving yield.
Google played a leading role in damaging the newspaper industry. Online users accessed articles through Google and advertising revenue migrated from the originators of credible news to the search engines and aggregators that fed off of them. It could be argued that by sucking the lifeblood out of countless newspapers, Google impoverished the production of quality news and contributed to the growth of “dumbed down” digital information that has severely dented the industry’s reputation.
Google might respond that it was merely disrupting an analogue industry, and, instead of whingeing, newspapers should just get with the times.
But a company with a true “no-evil philosophy” might have done things differently. It might have taken a more collaborative approach, appreciating the importance of not damaging credible news production, which is vital to democracy.
Be that as it may, Google has come to dominate global information and in 2009, surpassed more than a billion searches a day. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors exceeded a billion for the first time.
Earlier this year, Google removed the phrase “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct, replacing it with an updated statement that it “should be measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct”.
In fairness, the words have survived as a final aside in the 6,313-word document – “And remember … don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
Google is under increasing scrutiny for how it ranks information. It has been accused of introducing political bias into search results and of being prepared to modify its offering to appease Chinese censors. Along with other social media companies, it is under scrutiny by the US Congress for its role in allowing secretly funded political advertising that sought to distort election results.
At 20 years old, Google appears to have lost its innocence while dominating — perhaps even controlling — the world’s information flow. There is much to celebrate. And much to fear.
ANTICORPORATE AT FIRST, IT IS NOW ITSELF A GIANT CORPORATION WHICH SOME VIEW WITH SUSPICION