Happy birthday, Google! At 25 you have transformed the way we know the world
Adrian Weckler
The firm employs 8,000 people in Ireland and is a multiplier for the
online and software industry
When encyclopaedias were considered a valuable source of knowledge? When
Aertel and Ceefax were devoured for information on goals as they were
scored?
When 80pc of all mobile phones were Nokias, and the most sophisticated
thing you could do was to tease a squiggly line around a two-inch screen
in a game called Snake?
Last Christmas, I tried to go a single day without using any Google
product or service. No Maps, no Search, no YouTube, no Android. It was
possible but very, very difficult. And very, very slow.
It’s hard now to recall that there was a time when instantly checking
for information on your phone was unknown.
The first search engines were strictly for PC computers, and only if you
were connected to crawling, dial-up internet.
In 1998, when Google started, the biggest search engines were AltaVista,
Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.
Google was considered to be the nerdy, techie alternative, named after a
mathematical term for a 1 with a hundred zeros. But within months, word
had spread that that its ‘page-ranking’ system was the best around.
Its secret sauce was to count not just the number of times a search term
appeared on a website itself, but to weight that against links to and
from that site as a proxy for popular interest.
The results were pretty clear. Google searches returned much more
relevant results than its bigger rivals.
Almost overnight, it became the most popular search engine in a world
that hadn’t yet cottoned on to the impending information takeover of the
internet, the hundreds of billions that would soon be made in
advertising, or the shift in global power from news tycoons such as
Rupert Murdoch and Axel Springer to Silicon Valley executives such as
Google founders Sergey Brin, Larry Page and, later, Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg.
Ironically, Brin and Page originally sniffed at the idea of combining
their peer-approved engine to the vulgar business of matching results
with ads.
But almost as soon as they did, the trajectory of the company started to
look Alpine.
And 25 years later, with acquisitions such as YouTube, Google (or
‘Alphabet’ as its corporate parent name is) now makes more than €1bn per
week in profit.
Google employs 8,000 people here. Photo: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty
Images
Vast riches aside, one of Google’s most intriguing feats has been to get
so big while staying somewhat aloof from real infamy.
Imagine a company that controls almost everything we see online, from
news to entertainment to shopping to health advice. Imagine that the
same company has a virtual monopoly on your daily searches, filters most
of the world’s video output, owns most people’s email, has the most
popular web browser and even controls a majority of the world’s
smartphone systems.
Now, just for fun, imagine that that same company is also the world’s
biggest ad company, making the aforementioned €1bn per week in profit
and with a current market capitalisation of €1.6trn.
This would surely be the most controversial, debated, regulator-targeted
entity in the world, right?
Not so much, it seems.
Even the regulatory fines it has accrued in the EU which, at €8.3bn over
the last decade have exceeded all other big tech penalties here, don’t
seem to have placed it to the fore of corporate villains in the public eye.
Google hasn’t attracted the same kind of heated commentary as fellow Big
Tech quintet members, Meta, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft.
Is it because Google is considered to be more a low-key, everyday
utility than Apple (flashy hardware), Amazon (ruthless and cut-rate
retailer), Microsoft (monopolistic by nature) or Meta (reckless divider
and misinformation peddler)?
Google hasn’t attracted the same kind of heated commentary as fellow Big
Tech quintet members, Meta, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft
Can we simply not imagine our lives without it, in a way that we can do
without any of the other tech giants?
Ireland has a more complicated relationship with Google than most. It
has become the country’s largest tech employer here, with some 8,000
people working at it.
As importantly, it has become a multiplier for the online and software
industry in Ireland, as other tech firms often set up in Dublin because
they know they can poach experienced staff from Google.
All that adds up to Google being an unusually pivotal company in
Ireland, arguably more important to the country’s employment figures
than either Apple or Intel.
Not everything that Google touches is a hit. Despite its size and
budget, it struggles in some of the categories it’s working in.
For example, as an email-centric, web browser specialist, it’s odd how
it has mostly failed in the video-calling space, letting Zoom and
Microsoft and even Cisco’s WebEx become more of a fixture.
It’s even odder that its Pixel hardware, although well-priced and
high-performing in the areas of cameras and software, have not made any
significant dent in the smartphone duopoly that is Apple and Samsung.
It’s almost like Google regards these things as side-projects. The
company’s bread and butter has always been and may continue to be, ad
revenue from search and YouTube.
So is the company infallible? Nope. It is currently looking at an
existential moment in the rise of AI large language rivals, particular
from Microsoft-funded ChatGPT. Anyone who has used ChatGPT knows that it
is potentially a much better, more powerful way of searching for
relevant information quickly than Google’s current system. Google, we’re
told, is throwing the kitchen sink at this, with big plans for its own
Bard AI rollout. It needs to.
It’s also facing some very serious new regulatory constraints from the
EU’s Digital Markets Act that will stop companies from stitching up
information to their own benefit.
But as it celebrates its 25th birthday, Google can say it has become one
of the most important companies the world has ever seen.
Read more
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Irish Independent Technology
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