"Planet Earth After Google" or "How To Conquer the Known Universe With a Web Browser""

   In 1995, at Stanford University, two young computer science graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met and soon became friends.  Within a year, they were collaborating on a search engine called BackRub, a research project named for its ability to do back link analysis, as part of the Stanford Digital Library Project.  Their search engine operated on Stanford servers for more than a year, eventually taking up too much bandwidth.

Larry Page, Google Co-Founder & President, Products
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder & President, Technology

  Following the rage about BackRub, Page and Brin began working on Google.  The name being a play on the mathematical term googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros, it was chosen to symbolically represent Page's and Brin's goal to put a "seemingly infinite amount of information on the web," (from Google website).                    Headquartered in their dorm rooms, the pair begged, borrowed, and bought cheap, used PCs to build a server network, maxing out their credit cards in the process buying terabytes of disks at discount prices.  They tried to license their search engine technology, but found no one interested in the early stage project.  So they kept it, sought more development financing, improved their product, and took it to the public themselves.  That course worked well, and with more development Google became hotly sought after.  One early investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is quoted saying, "Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?", after a quick preview of Google.  His check for $100,000 was made to Google Inc., however, and as a legal entity Google Inc. didn't exist.  Page and Brin incorporated within two weeks. cashed Bechtolsheim's check, and raised another $900,000 in additional start-up funding.
  In September, 1998, Google Inc. opened in Menlo Park, California, and Google.com, a beta search engine, started answering 10,000 search queries each day.
  On September 21, 1999, Google officially removed "beta" from its title.

 














  Perhaps in their wildest dreams young Larry Page and Sergey Brin did hope for their creation to impact the entire planet in a profound way.  Perhaps they did intend to change the way that the human species gleans knowledge from the collective database of the ages.  But today, quite after the fact, it is probably safe to say that even they had no clue how far reaching the impact of Google would be.  And far reaching it is, even finding its way into the English lexicon as a popular verb, to google.  From those somewhat humble beginnings as a graduate school project called BackRub, and then a search engine with the domain google.stanford.edu serving 10,000 requests a day, into the communication behemoth it is today,  Google has grown into what could arguably be called the backbone of the internet.

The first Google computer at Stanford   

  By their very nature, statistics for web browsers and search engines are very difficult to calculate.  At its peak in
early 2004, Google handled upwards of 84.7% of all search requests on the World Wide Web, through its website and through its partnerships with other Internet clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN.  Yahoo! dropped its partnership in February of that year.  In June 2013, Google carried 42.68% of internet traffic usage share, as compared to 25.44% for Internet Explorer and 20.01% for Firefox, according to Wikipedia.  These statistics are hotly debated and contested, but probably do represent a close ballpark figure.   One verifiable figure that could be argued to demonstrate Google's dominance of the market is the announcement in September that Android had passed 1 billion device activations.  As society continues to shift into a wireless, mobile place, this is very significant in that Android is an open standards platform, and Google is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance.  These open standards movements are very significant in our time, as some, including myself, feel strongly that we, as diverse cultures, as a species, are on the cusp of a major upheaval in world society.  There seems to be a sense about this fact in different circles, with the general masses kept as ignorant as possible with their work-a-day lives and basic efforts of survival, while world powers grow restless at trying to curb the freedom of information that has emerged with the growth of the Internet.  In the United States, we have been somewhat insulated from this occurrence by our relatively high standard of living, but as the rest of the world seeks to attain western culture for themselves, those powers behind the power are driven to panic in an effort to retain control for themselves.

All of this aforementioned situation might not seem to relate directly to the growth of Google at first, because as such things go, it could have been some other company that emerged at the forefront of web search technology at the dawn of the millennium.  But it was Google that emerged from underdog status to take the lead at the helm of internet search.  And thus it was Google and the vision of its founders that prevailed.  Namely, "Don't be evil,"  a phrase which they went so far as to include in their prospectus for their 2004 IPO, noting that "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."  And Google has grown into the all encompassing machine that masses of individuals and groups have come to love; docs, drive, gmail, YouTube, etc., etc...........

  It might be easy to snurl one's nose at such a sugary statement from a corporate giant, in our age of cynicism, if not for knowledge in hindsight that they have kept their word.
  Undoubtedly Google has made its founders very rich (Brin and Page are of course not the only ones, but to keep my article manageable I did not go into that angle of things), but true to their vision they have given back much; Google Grants, the Google Anita Borg Scholarship, Google Scholar, google.org, Apps for Education, Bold Internship, Google Serve, Google Ventures, Google Crisis Response, Transparency Report, Renewable Energy Efforts, Google Art Project, Google Science Fair, Global Impact Awards, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funding, Calico.  As you see, one could write a tome on Google's efforts to improve society. 

  This is the intro to the summary of government requests from Google's Transparency Website:

Like other technology and communications companies, Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from our services or to review such content to determine if it should be removed for inconsistency with a product's community policies. In this report, we disclose the number of requests we receive from each government in six-month periods with certain limitations.

Governments ask companies to remove or review content for many different reasons. For example, some content removals are requested due to allegations of defamation, while others are due to allegations that the content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or adult content. Laws surrounding these issues vary by country, and the requests reflect the legal context of a given jurisdiction. We hope this tool will be helpful in discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests.

  Perhaps we are all the more fortunate that Google has been thrust into this position, because the key word is "good."  Take the transparency issues.  What if Google's principles had been more in line with strict profit orientation like many companies have been exposed to be in recent times?  Google led the way in transparency about government censorship, and then partnered with others in 2012 to urge protest of proposals SOPA and PIPA, in the US, wich would have censored and impeded innovation on the internet, leading to abandonment of the bills.

  A point of view which perhaps sums up this look at Google, and its influence on our lives as Internet users, comes from one journalist blogging after the 15th anniversary:
 

Last weekend Google celebrated its 15th birthday. As a search engine, Google’s only a teenager (I feel like assigning her the female gender, so let’s go with it) and it’s easy for most of us to forget how young Google really is. She can’t even drive, but she gives people directions. She’s fast, sophisticated, and constantly changing. Despite her youth, we as a society have placed a lot of trust into her because, well, she improves our lives and does a lot of good.

 

However, as Google turns 15 and charges ahead with more advanced features, innovations, and products, it’s also important to step back and fully evaluate Google’s role in our lives. Not that Google’s not awesome - just that her influence is fairly large and powerful, and any company that grows as large as Google just needs an eye kept on it.

  In 2011, Larry Page once again became CEO of Google, 10 years after he last held the title.  And we should feel confident that he will lead the company to many more positive victories in the quest to do good for the world and ensure that the web is open to us all.  After all, Google is his baby.