25 years of Google: 3 successes and 2 controversies in the search engine’s history

[ad_1]

Google brought great innovations to internet users, but it was not immune to controversy. Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google in 1998 reality a desire of Internet users. People wanted to see what the dress she wore to the Grammys looked like, but Google at the time didn’t have the option to search just by images. All results given by the search engine were in text. The furor over the singer’s dress was so great that the search engine’s developers launched Google Images, an exclusive search engine for photos. This was one of several moments that marked the history of Google, created by university students Larry Page and Sergey Brin and launched in September 1998. In these 25 years, it has become the most used online search engine in the world, as well as a technology conglomerate gigantic that faces countless criticisms and even lawsuits for its dominant position and its practices to increase its advertising revenues. Also read: Slow Wi-Fi? Find out how to solve the problem How to make WhatsApp audio turn into text? See tips for digital security The birth of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two doctoral students at Stanford University (USA) in the 1990s, when they started working on the project. At first they hadn’t gotten along very well, but they became friends while developing a new Internet search system in their bedroom. Initially the engine was called BackRub and listed results based on the popularity of the pages. Page and Brin later changed the name to Google, based on the mathematical term “googol,” which is the number 10 raised to the power of 100. “What made Google unique in the beginning were two things: on the one hand, the PageRank algorithm and, on the other, the clear design of the page, focused on search and without advertising”, explains researcher Dirk Lewandowski, specialist in search systems at the University Duisburg-Essen (Germany), to BBC Mundo. PageRank is the system that orders search results based on a series of criteria. Page and Brin left university with the software ready and raised US$1 million from relatives, acquaintances and other investors and, on September 4, 1998, they commercially launched their company. In 2005 they changed their official birthday celebration to September 27th. “When Google was born, competitors followed a portal strategy, that is, integrating as many services as possible (such as email, news, etc.) on a single website. The search remained in the background and users were faced with cluttered websites”, highlights Lewandowski. Google had about 10,000 queries per day in the first few weeks. Today the search engine has more than 1 billion searches per day in 150 languages ​​and 190 countries. The all-powerful and controversial algorithm When a user makes a query on a search engine, they rarely look beyond the first page of results presented. This makes a huge difference in which sites and what type of information reaches users. The results presented on Google are not a random list: the search engine algorithm is responsible for filtering and ordering them. The way the algorithm is designed and its consequences have become more criticized by technology analysts in recent years. “Google’s great promise was to organize the world’s information, but over the last quarter of a century, a huge amount of information has been designed to rank well in Google’s results,” says Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Google website. technology The Verge. “We live in an information ecosystem whose design is dominated by the needs of Google’s search engine: a robot that can create entire industries as easily as it can destroy them,” he adds. Lewandowski explains that the original algorithm, PageRank, was responsible for evaluating the structure of web links and obtaining information about their popularity or quality. “Not all links count equally, but link value in turn depends on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it,” he explains. “This means that a link from a popular site counts much more than a link from an unpopular site. So, for example, if the BBC puts a link to a certain page, that counts much more than if I put the link to the same page on my blog”, says the expert. There is no perfect search engine, he continues, as everyone interprets web content differently “and therefore in most cases there cannot be a right or wrong search result”. “But that doesn’t mean Google doesn’t do its job very well. For countless information needs, this search engine offers useful results to answer our questions”, says Lewandowski. Being dominant in the sector, the company has faced challenges from government entities in Europe and the United States, which have tried to regularize its operations. Google is currently facing the first major trial in the US, against the Department of Justice, which accuses the company of carrying out illegal monopolistic practices through anti-competitive distribution agreements with cell phone manufacturers and telephone companies. Google’s lawyers deny the accusations and argue that they enjoy their good position in the market “on their own merits”. The little-known Bert One of the biggest innovations for machines to understand human language recently appeared at Google, although users probably didn’t realize it: the BERT system. “If a pancake recipe told you to mix the batter with the banana, you probably wouldn’t think of using the banana as a mixing spoon. But what is obvious to humans – things like context, tone, intent – ​​are actually very difficult for computers to capture,” explains the company. Engineers created Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a system based on neural network engineering that allows Google’s language understanding models to be trained on the way humans speak. It has been implemented in research as of 2019 in more than 70 languages. BERT helps process user queries by finding the definition of words in the context in which they are placed. And it is a machine learning system, that is, it is capable of learning, which is why it increasingly refines its results. “There is a big difference between knowing the words and understanding the meaning,” explains Google. Before BERT, omitted prepositions, inconsistent word order, or user intent generated less useful responses than those presented today, according to developers. Google Lens Over the past two decades, Google has added useful tools such as the translator that allows you to read pages in other languages ​​or the voice search that has become popular on cell phones. But one of its most important technological advances was launched in 2017: Google Lens, a technology capable of using the user’s camera lens to obtain information from the internet. If a person wants to know the name of a plant, it is difficult to get the perfect result by describing in words what the leaves or flowers look like. Just like when you are in front of a painting of which you want to know the title or the author. Also, when you are traveling in a place where another language is spoken, using the camera to instantly translate signals is very useful. This is what Lens can do: broadly speaking, it works by comparing the objects that appear in the lens with other similar images online and then classifying their relevance, returning a relevant answer. “Suppose Lens is looking at a dog that it identifies with 95% probability as a German Shepherd and with 5% probability as a Corgi. In this case, Lens could only show the result corresponding to the German shepherd, considered the most similar from a visual point of view”, states Google. According to its most recent report, Lens receives more than 12 billion queries per month. Advertising The management of the algorithm is closely linked to another criticism that has been made against Google: the ads in its results. In the beginning, Google did not display advertising, and its creators even explicitly opposed advertising-funded search engines when they published an article introducing their project. But today Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has other goals. One of its main sources of income is the advertising that appears between the links in the results of each search carried out by the user. “People love asking Google questions and Google loves making money by answering them”, criticizes Nilay Patel. One problem with this is that many people don’t pay attention to whether they are clicking on a paid link, which serves the interests of the person promoting it, or a page that appears in the results because it was selected by the algorithm. Google, in turn, guarantees that it acts with “transparency” and that paid ads have clear identification. “What Google definitely doesn’t do well has to do with its business model, context-based advertising. These ads appear on the search results page and are very similar to regular search results,” says Lewandowski. “And here we must take into account that there is not only advertising for products and services, but also, for example, political and social issues”, he adds. Larry Page and Sergei Brin are currently removed from the company’s public management. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has responded to the criticism and legal challenges the company has faced in recent years. In a letter celebrating Google’s 25th anniversary, he acknowledged that there had been “some setbacks” and said that you “learn lessons and work to improve.” But above all, he highlighted “the innovation that the company’s founders and engineers” have made over the years. “An essential truth of innovation is that the moment you push the limits of a technology, it soon moves from the extraordinary to the ordinary,” he wrote. “That’s why Google never took success for granted.” Information security area with a salary of R$38 thousand Information security on the rise: see how to enter the sector Get to know Google’s AI Bard, ‘Google’s ChatGPT’, is launched in Brazil Layoffs in big techs Layoffs in big techs: the What’s happening with Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon

[ad_2]

Source link