Google’s Integration into Our Daily Lives

Google is truly a name everyone recognizes, to the point that the name has taken on a meaning of its own. Everyone knows what it means ‘to Google’ something and many people, especially of the younger generations, are so reliant on using it for researching purposes that they would be lost without it. Starting off as a search engine, Google has grown to encompass a variety of different services and is one of the largest companies in the world.

Percentage of people who use Google

So many people use Google that in the US alone there are 246 million users. Their other services are also highly successful with 1.5 billion active users on their Gmail service and 1.9 million active users on YouTube. This widespread use doesn’t only cover personal usage, but businesses as well. They boast over two million accounts on Google Ads and more than 2.9 million companies use Google’s marketing services in some way. They also have 2.5 billion Android device users worldwide.

History of Google

What started as a simple research project became one of the world’s most used online services in what seemed to be the blink of an eye. Google started in January of 1996 by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan. These PhD students attended Stanford University in California. While Hassan wrote a great deal of the coding and was the lead programmer, he left prior to Google becoming a company and eventually started a career in robotic technology development.

The main focus behind the project was to change the way a search engine worked. Up to this point, most search engines merely determined how many times the searched term appeared on a web page to decide on which to pull up first. The young men knew there had to be a better way and developed an algorithm they called PageRank. To create better results, the algorithm looked at the number of pages on a website and how those pages related to the original website. Larry Page first came up with the concept and Hassan started working on it. While Hassan left before the project turned into a company, Page and Brin fully admitted his influence, as well as that of Alan Steremberg. They also worked with Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winigrad to write the very first research paper about it. In 1998, they also named Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman as having helped. This was obviously a work containing many ideas and influence. When the search engine was first fully developed, Page and Brin called it BackRub and then switched it to Google to sound the same as the mathematical word googol. The term means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and they thought it was a good correlation with how the search engine will result in plentiful results. On September 15, 1997, they registered the domain name www.goole.com.

Like most major ideas, it was going to take money to get it off the ground. In 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems put $100,000 on their idea and they were able to begin their company within weeks, using a garage as their base. Soon, three more investors appeared to add to their funding. These were the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos, David Cheriton who was a computer science professor at Page and Brin’s university, and an entrepreneur named Ram Shriram.

Through the rest of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, they received some smaller investments until June, when they were able to secure $25 million in funding from larger sources, such as venture capital firms. It seemed everyone recognized the good idea these young men had.

The company grew rapidly. By 2006, the word Google was added as a verb to both the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. It was defined as, “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet”. By 2011, Google passed one billion visitors. They had reached a point of success as to change the way we talk about research. The growth of the company was astounding.

Google’s acquired companies and financials

Google went public in 2004 through an initial public offering. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at $85 per share. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, an American technology businessman agreed they would work together at Google for 20 years. By the third quarter of the following year, Google boasted a 700% jump in profit. This was attributed to the switch from companies buying advertisements in paper format and television to buying advertisements online instead. Their NASDAQ face is under both GOOG and GOOGL

In 2006, Google saw $10.495 billion from advertising revenue and they acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. In 2007, the company had grown enough that their shares were at $350. Individual investors were the main reason for the increase, unlike some other companies who see their growth due to mutual funds and investments from institutions. In another year they acquired DoubleClick, gaining them the connections and relationships DoubleClick had with other companies, including some beneficial advertising agencies. By 2011, the majority of Google’s revenue was from advertising so much that it accounted for 96%.

They went on to buy Motorola Mobility in May of 2012 for $12.5 billion. This was its largest acquisition and opened the door to wireless technology and cell phones, a quickly growing area that Google wanted to be a part of. This acquisition was also important because it helped safeguard Google against patent disputes it had with wireless technology providers like Apple and Microsoft. It allowed Google to continue selling Android devices. This was also the year they reached $50 billion in revenue for the year, a massive jump from the previous year’s $38 billion. The following year, Google continued its trend of acquisitions and for $966 million bought Waze, a GPS based app built to help people avoid traffic issues and find better ways to get where they were traveling.

In a change of focus, this same year they acquired Waze, they also began a new company called Calico. This company was made to be a health focused company with the goal of helping ageing and age related diseases. A year later on January 26, 2014, they acquired a London based artificial intelligence company called DeepMind Technologies. Their market capitalism was at $397 billion and they were seeing continual immense growth.

Having delved into mobile technology and AI technology development, they now turned their attention towards the world of gaming and created a gaming platform called Google Stadia. Resulting from this development, it was reported that in 2021 they paid $20 million for Ubisoft ports on Google Stadia. Google’s search engine market share is more than 90% and Google Chrome is now the most used internet browser with a market share of 69.28%

Controversy and criticism

Google faced some backlash when they fired James Damore on August 8, 2017. He had sent out a memo to the entire company that criticized Google’s handling of diversity and inclusion. The memo stated that it wasn’t just discrimination, but had to do with biological factors as well, saying that on average, women are less likely to be interested in careers involving technical positions. Sundar Pichai, the current Google CEO, was not happy with this memo and stated that Damore was in violation of company policy. Pichai said that Damore was furthering gender stereotypes in the workplace and Damore was fired that very same day. It was reported in the New York Times that Pichai was also in the wrong and should resign.

This wasn’t the last time Google would face some backlash. In 2018 and 2019, the rift between management and staff became rather hostile as there were multiple disagreements in how certain situations were handled. The way they were dealing with sexual harassment claims within the company was one of the main issues. Google tried to calm some of the tension by announcing that 48 employees were fired over the previous two years due to sexual harassment issues. This was in response to The New York Times publishing that the company had been protecting Andy Rubin, one of the co-founders of Android who had allegations made against him of sexual harassment. Despite Rubin denying it adamantly and claiming it was lies made up to create problems for his ongoing divorce and custody battle, Google’s own investigations found them to be credible. The reports and rumors of Rubin receiving a large amount of money, to the sum of $90 million, offended and upset many employees. This incident, on top of others, instigated the mass walk-out of more than 20,000 Google employees in protest. In 2019, there were still reports from some workers stating that Google retaliated against some of these outspoken workers.

Another issue Google has faced was with the 2019 investigation by the US Dept. of Justice. They believed Google had committed antitrust violations and in 2020 they filed an antitrust lawsuit, charging them with abusing their power and establishing a monopoly in the search engine marketplace. This isn’t the only time laws have been against Google. In 2021, the Australian Government proposed legislation to require Google, as well as Facebook, to pay for the news articles. The reasoning was that because people are able to simply find these articles through these platforms, the media companies weren’t able to gain the traffic and profit. In a somewhat childish response, Google threatened to deny all of Australia access to its search engine instead of trying to work with these media companies, causing a great deal of criticism.

Google has taken every advantage of its multinational position to avoid paying taxes. Many of these tactics would be considered underhanded and despite the fact that it’s one of the largest information technology companies, it has still managed to pay the lowest taxes to the places its revenue originated. By moving profits through multiple countries, Google has managed to save $3.1 billion in taxes. Because of the way they transfer money around, France has reportedly begun to investigate their transfer pricing practices. Google itself has said it consolidated all of its intellectual property holding to the US, and Google Vice-President Matt Brittin even testified to the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons that Google’s UK sales team made no sales and so they didn’t owe any sales tax to the UK. In 2016, Google settled with the UK to pay £130 million in back taxes and must pay higher taxes in the future. In 2017 Google once again moved $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda to save on taxes. It seems the massive company has no intention of quitting its practice of finding loopholes. Another concerning aspect of this is that Google spends a great deal on lobbying. In 2003 they ranked 213th in lobbying spending, but in ten years they jumped all the way to 5th. They also came in second in campaign donations within the technology and internet services section. 

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Early Life

Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973, in Michigan. He grew up in a home that regularly had computer parts around. At only six, he grew accustomed to computers and would play with the things around his home. He also regularly had magazines about science and technology lying around for him to read. However, technology wasn’t his only interest. He also was a musician and learned about music composition. He even attended the Interlochen Arts Camp to further his music education. Page would say that this background in music is one of the reasons he became interested in computer speeds and performance. Because timing is such an integral part of music, his sense of time passing was more focused and therefore he became impatient with the waiting. Instead of just learning to live with it, he wanted to change it.

Sergey Brin was born in August of 1973. He and his family lived in Moscow in a three-room apartment. They shared this small space with his father’s parents until one day in 1977 when his father came home from a conference for mathematics in Warsaw, Poland. He told his family that they were going to emigrate and leave their home. This wasn’t always an easy task during this time as many Jews were being denied their exit visa applications. When his father put in the request in 1978, he was immediately fired and soon his mother also lost her job for similar reasons. They had to wait eight months working smaller jobs to stay afloat until they heard back about their application. In 1979, they were finally able to leave Moscow and arrived in the United States of America in October. His own parents being highly educated and interested in sciences and mathematics, Brin enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1990 and was able to work hard and earn a Bachelor of Science with honors in computer science and mathematics. He was only 19 years old. He went on to intern at Wolfram Research in 1993, furthering his education and experience with mathematics. Later, he began his graduate study at Stanford University in computer science. Since 2008, he has been on leave from his PhD studies as he’s worked on other things. 

The start of Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met while the two worked on their PhD studies at Stanford University. They worked together on Larry Page’s concept of a revised search engine and were soon in business together, building the world’s most used search engine. While they own 14% of Google shares, they control 56% of stockholder voting power through their super-voting stock, giving them a decent amount of control over the company. Despite the controversial events leading up to the walk-out, the company has maintained a reputation for being an interesting and fun place to work, providing innovative concepts about the work environment and motivation. In 2007, 2008, and 2012 Fortune magazine listed Google as the best company to work for. However, they have faced multiple complaints about a lack of diversity within their company, leading some to wonder if they really are as inviting and open as they claim.

Good deeds

Google has made it clear that they have a high concern about climate change. They’ve made several changes within their company such as putting money towards wind farms, installing solar panels, and working towards going carbon-free in its data centers by 2030. Even this seems to fall a little flat as they have continued to donate to multiple politicians who deny climate change and in 2011 admitted to still using enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, causing some distrust among the more hard-core climate activists.

References: