Google IS the internet

It’s an important birthday this month. With apologies to my mum – who does actually turn 77 right about now, so best wishes to her – the birthday in question is Google’s.

Yes, the world’s favourite search engine, Google, is coming of age, for on Saturday it will be exactly 21 years since the domain name was registered in 1997 by PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who invented it while studying the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web.

By mid-1998, Google was quietly available to those in the know. And to me. Ah Google, I remember how we first met: the computer chap at work, David, was at technology’s cutting edge and it was he who whispered to me about this new way to search the internet.

I tried it. I was stunned. David smiled knowingly as my world changed. Almost at once, Ask Jeeves was retired from my life and Yahoo’s database was left to the hicks.

Within days, I had introduced my closest friends to the future – oh, the thrill of being there first – and soon all of us were looking up things on Google. Googling. Yes, you know you’ve made it when your noun becomes a verb.

Back then Google was a renegade, an independent, a good guy to have on your team.

Now Google is everything and everywhere, with 3.5 billion direct searches a day in 149 languages. Google dominates the search engine field, with 90% of the global market share across all devices. Its closest rival is Bing at 3.2%.

Google is the establishment; Google IS the Internet.

It’s also a massive corporation worth billions, with the end goal of making money.

It knows us so well: it notes where we linger, it watches our social media activity, it scatters cookies after us, it advertises to us specifically just like in a scifi movie, and it tracks us wherever we go, right to the very end of 4G.

If you’re in Argentina or China it will censor what you see; if you’re anywhere else it will filter information according to everything it knows about you – a user-friendly censorship of sorts.

It has shaped how we think; it has changed the world. So happy birthday Google. And, for what it’s worth, I looked up all the facts contained here via DuckDuckGo, my current non-tracking, privacy-protecting search engine of choice.