Long, long ago, before dates were made over g-chat or news was filtered through Google Reader, the internet was a wild, wild west with gold waiting to be mined. Many cowboys tried to tame it and some mined for gold (with a few eurekas here and there) but no one has had more influence on the shape of the internet or how we find and process news and information more than Google.
As Battelle wrote, the modern story of the internet can be best told through search. And the story of search is most completely captured in the story of Google, a company barely a decade old but still one of – if not the – world’s hottest companies. Why did search and, ultimately, Google, the best search company of the past decade, become such ubiquitous pieces of modern culture? As the internet grew from a few pages run by techies with discrete interests to a web of billions of pages spanning nearly every topic one might imagine, the need to organize it all in a way that the most computer illiterate of all can comprehend became a critical need as the potential of the internet proved to alter the world.
From Lycos to Excite to Yahoo and more, the quest to build the strongest and the best search engine was on. But it was two engineering graduate students at Stanford who, bored with their PhD studies, developed the method that has, in just a few years, replaced all else.
In less than a decade, Google grew from company with 39 employees and less than $20 million in the bank to one of the world’s most recognized brands, with thousands of employees and a public stock offering that led to even greater expansion.
Once Google created this new method of search, the trick was to give it a profiteering purpose. Through the evolution of platforms like AdWords and AdSense, Google achieved that.
Sometimes it gets creepy, with Google’s hulking big-brother shadow cast all about. For example, I often chat over Google’s e-mail chat platform with one friend about eating chana masala, one of my favorite Indian dishes (and possibly the name of my unconceived daughter). And I frequently see advertisements at the top of my free-e-mail window about cookbooks with recipes for the spicy chickpea dish. The cartoon chiding Google for its power relates back to my own life: I started using Google for internet searches because its interface felt cleaner than others; now Google provides my e-mail, a RSS filter, document storage, a chat program, my blog, friends’ online photo storage, driving directions, and probably more than I even know about.
While I generally choose not to support giant corporations or companies, I embrace Google despite concerns about big brother and infringement on my dinner plans. That’s because no company can do what Google does for me. Their e-mail service is far better than the one my company pays for me to use; products like Google Earth and g-chat are novel, clever, and fun to use. And it’s always fun to check the Google homepage on holidays to see how they’ve temporarily designed the logo.
It’s not all roses, however. Recently, I spent some time working on the earliest beginnings of a company project to map out several large campuses in Google Earth. The goal was to populate Google’s satellite images with useful information that would help visitors navigate around campus, take a virtual tour through campus with 3-D buildings and information about buildings’ histories and where to get a cup of joe, and post that information both on Google’s public platform (which is populated by user-generated content) and on our own servers. It was complicated. Google’s satellite images were years out of date and we wanted to replace them. We wanted to know about a company who might build the 3-D models for us. After I took a professional (and very expensive) course with Google, I tried to contact professionals at Google Earth via telephone and e-mail. But for more than a month, no one would return calls or offer substantive e-mail responses to pointed questions from me or a colleague. The company’s unresponsiveness was a turnoff, and, as Battelle explained in his book, part of the company’s ethos. Seems kind of evil to me
But the truth is, Google doesn’t have to be customer friendly. I’m still going to use their products, no matter how poor their customer service, because what Google provides is far superior to anything else out there. Other companies know this, and some don’t even try to take on Google any more, like Ask.com did when they re-focused their plan to target a demographic rather than compete with Google.
Search, search engines, and the Next Big Internet Thing has been a constantly evolving beast since it first started. Even now, with Google as the unchallenged leader in its field, we are considering, what is next, and who will be there?
