Google – The Biggest and Most Influential Force in High-Tech
Today, google is one of the most dominant forces in the world’s digital economy. Its search engine has revolutionised the way people use the internet, to the point that you can now say “googling” as a verb and it is used by everyone from politicians to home computer users. The company has also branched out into hardware, cloud computing, software and artificial intelligence – making it the largest tech company in the world and one of the most influential forces in high-tech.
Google was founded in 1996 as a research project by graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in California. Their search engine, BackRub, worked by using a number of computers to search the web for mentions of keywords that were entered into a search box. By counting how many times a particular word appeared on a website, the system could then rank websites according to their relevance to your query.
This was the beginning of a revolutionary concept that would eventually become the Google search engine. BackRub grew quickly and within a decade the company had acquired numerous other sites and companies, including YouTube and DoubleClick, and was earning billions of dollars in advertising revenue. In 2002, the Google News service was launched, allowing users to see real time news articles from all over the globe, including localised editions of major newspapers. Later that year, Google introduced Froogle, a search tool for products sold online by businesses.
As Google continued to grow, it became a multinational corporation with its own data centres on each continent and more than 50 different services and products. The company also has a number of subsidiary companies, such as life-extending project Calico, tech industry private equity firm CapitalG and robotics development company DeepMind.
Today, google employs thousands of people worldwide and has offices in more than 50 countries. Its technology includes a range of software, cloud computing services, mobile devices and self-driving cars. Its flagship search engine is constantly evolving, with new features and algorithms being added to improve performance. Its personalised results are tailored to each user’s needs and are determined by location, search history and settings.
The search algorithm sifts through billions of pages in its index every second. A variety of factors is taken into account including spelling mistakes, the type of query and a system that recognises synonyms. Searches are also categorised based on the intention behind them, with words such as ‘review’, ‘pictures’ and ‘opening hours’ being recognised as requests for specific types of information. The process is so complex and intricate that it has been compared to solving a mathematical puzzle. The results are displayed almost instantly, with just a fraction of a second’s delay between entering the keyword and seeing the first results. This is a testament to the immense amount of engineering that goes into the Google search engine and its many innovations over the years.
