25years ago, searching for the meaning of a word or the address of a restaurant in a city required a visit to the library or map store, and perhaps hours of research and confusion, while many of us now only need a few seconds to put the word or address into the Google search engine, and see... Results.
But searching for these things is just one of dozens or hundreds of things that have become so easy and shortened after the search giant, Google, came to light in 2017, that it is now common to use the term “Googling” to describe the search process that the engine conducts trillions of times. per day.
How has the world changed after Google?
Obtaining your favorite soup recipe and your doctor's address has become much easier after Google, but that is not all that the most famous search engine offers.
The user can also search through billions of images to get the cute cat image that he wants to decorate the background of his computer in less than a second. He can also, through Google products such as YouTube, search through billions of video and music clips, obtain a summary of scientific research, and answer questions. Legal, and understanding how to apply for a college or job, during the period that a person needs to make a cup of tea or less.
This freed up users' time like never before, giving them thousands of additional hours of productivity, says computer specialist Hunter Reid in an article published on the Press Box website.
Today, Google manufactures hundreds of products that are used by billions of people around the world, such as YouTube, the Android mobile operating system, and the most famous email, Gmail.
This had a profound impact on the global economy, Reed adds.
How to outperform Google Engine?
Google appeared before its fellow search engines, and almost completely dominated the market, even in the presence of competitors such as Bing from the technology giant Microsoft.
According to a study published on the statistical website Statsta, Google’s share of daily internet searches is about 83.5, compared to only 9.1 for Bing.
This gave Google absolute control of the market for more than two decades, Reed says, because of "the unique way Google was created and its influence on the way society thinks."
He adds that what gave the company this unique effect is its PageRank technology.
This algorithm is what allows Google to quickly find the most relevant web pages, which is very important in the information society.
He says this is why other search engines like Bing fail in this aspect.
Google says on its website, “In a split second, Google's search algorithms sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in our search index to find the most relevant and useful results for what you're searching for.”
The beginning story
The Google story began in 1995 at Stanford University, according to the search engine's website.
Its inventor, Larry Page, was thinking of attending Stanford University for graduate school and hired Sergey Brin, a student there, to show him around.
The two then went to work - from their bedrooms - and built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of pages on the World Wide Web.
They called the search engine Backrub.
Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google, the name a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflects Larry and Sergey's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
The site says that over the next few years, Google attracted the attention of not only the academic community, but Silicon Valley investors as well.
In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $1 million, and Google Inc. was born. officially.
With this investment, the team has moved to the place that brings together all the major technology giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, the home garage.
The two students worked out of the suburban California garage owned by Susan Wojcicki, then the company's 16th employee and the former CEO of YouTube.
The site says, “The departure from traditional things has been present from the beginning, from the initial Google server made of Lego to the doodles.”
In the years that followed, the company rapidly expanded out of the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters known as Googleplex Mountain View, California.
Now, the economic website Market Trends estimates the value of Alphabet, the company that owns Google, at more than $1.6 trillion.
Google's "failed" products
In addition to the famous search engine and Chrome browser, Google has products that are so successful that they have entered the lives of almost everyone who uses the Internet, such as YouTube, the famous search engine and video and music viewer, which recently entered the television broadcasting market through the YouTube TV product.
Google's Android operating system accounts for more than 70 percent of the mobile phone operating system market, compared to less than 30 percent for Apple's iOS system, according to the Bank My Cell website, which specializes in mobile phone research.
Google's mapping system (Google Maps) controls 67 percent of the world's map software market, and the company also regularly launches new models of phones and tablets that are quite popular among users.
But the company had its share of products that did not meet with success, such as Google +, which was supposed to be a social platform, and products such as Google Glass, which is digital glasses that carry a camera, Google Reader, which is a digital text reader, and Google Hangouts, the chat program from Google and others. Products.
Will Google end soon?
Google has been around for 25 years now, and most millennials have grown up with Google always being a part of their lives.
But artificial intelligence has begun to pose a real threat to Google's position, to the point that the company has launched its own version, which does not seem very popular, of artificial intelligence chat models.
The American network CNBC quoted the technology giant and owner of Microsoft, Bill Gates, during his speech as saying that the artificial intelligence model that will win the trust of users in the future, and force them to use it as a comprehensive personal assistant, will radically change user behavior to the point that users will not use it. search engine again, nor will they use sites like Amazon to purchase goods.
Gates said that it will take some time until this powerful future digital assistant is ready for widespread use.
Until then, companies will continue to include so-called generative AI techniques similar to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT in their own products.
Disadvantages of search engine
Throughout its history, the company has been exposed to lawsuits related to user privacy, as specialists worry that the algorithm that the company uses in the Chrome browser retains a lot of information about users and sometimes allows it to be transferred to third parties, taking advantage of the user’s lack of attention to the precise expressions in privacy agreements, but this is not the only thing that matters. It worries specialists.
Specialist Hunter Reed quotes information technology professor Jeffrey Rothman as saying, “The more we use services like Google, the more our brains organize the world in a way based on superficial information.”
“As a result, the way we interact with information is vastly more disjointed than it was for our ancestors,” Rothman adds.
In comparison, looking up the meaning of a word in a dictionary would often lead to learning other words, with the research journey itself contributing to learning. Likewise, getting lost in a city might lead to discovering its most unique details.
But ready-made results deprive the researcher of all of this, according to Reid, and “learning to sort information yourself and determine the most important from the least important is an important skill that Google deprives people of learning efficiently.”