Google reaches 25 years of hegemony on the internet – 09/26/2023 – Tech

Google celebrates its 25th anniversary this Wednesday (27th). It all started at Stanford University, in California, United States, where two doctoral students created what would be not only the largest search engine on the internet but also the technology that would leverage an empire of digital advertising and the attention economy — the dispute for people’s limited time.

The same platform delivers answers to 8.5 billion daily searches, advertising services to 89 million websites and receives data from different sources, such as the Google Chrome browser, the Android operating system, the Gmail email service and the Google Drive cloud . This ecosystem of digital marketing, services and surveillance makes Alphabet valued at US$1.66 trillion (R$8.21 trillion) this Monday (25).

The search engine does not clarify why chose September 27, 1998 as its creation date, as It was on September 4th of that year that the company Google was registered.

FROM SEARCHES TO ADVERTISING LEADERSHIP

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started this technology empire even earlier, with an initial investment of US$100,000 (R$487,000) and the invention, in 1995, of PageRank — an index of relevance for each web page. The proposed measure was the number and quality of links that, in other web addresses, indicated the page in question.

The assumption of the creators of Google, which at the time was called BackRub — back massage in English — was that the most important sites would receive more targeting from other web addresses.

The name Google is an adaptation of googol, a number equivalent to 10 raised to the hundredth power (ten duotrigintillion), in an exaggerated reference to the number of pages indexed on the platform.

The ranking system allowed the creation of a more efficient search engine than the competition at the time, represented mainly by Yahoo. Existing search engines considered how many times the search term appeared on each of the internet pages to classify them. A search for the word “internet”, for example, first returned a page written in Chinese ideograms in which the word was repeated several times without context.

The system also served to make the Google AdWords tool (2000), which sells ads in the search engine itself, more efficient in attracting buyers than the competition. This digital marketing model crossed borders in 2003, with the launch of AdSense, which acts as a middle ground between advertisers and websites using the service.

In 2018, AdWords underwent a complete redesign, also started selling ads to third parties and, since then, it has been called Google Ads. At the end of 2022, Google received 28.8% of total revenue linked to digital marketing, according to consultancy Insider Intelligence.

Media theorist Jeff Jarvis, author of the book “What Would Google Do” (2009), assesses that the search engine dominated the internet with an old business model — that of mass media. Executive Eric Schmidt led Google between 2001 and 2011 in this turn towards advertising.

“What Google did was create a new market of advertisers who couldn’t afford the prices charged by newspapers, magazines, radio and television. So these entrepreneurs were able to market efficiently at the appropriate scale,” says Jarvis.

Between 2010 and 2011, Google’s market value already fluctuated between US$300 billion (R$1.5 trillion) and US$400 billion (R$2 trillion) in values ​​adjusted for inflation.

SERVICE ECOSYSTEM

Technical innovation in this service came with the analysis of large amounts of data, predictive models and artificial intelligence to deliver the right advertisement to the most likely customer, without the need for large marketing departments.

The first data collected was what users were looking for, but that was not enough to supply the giant with the necessary information. As the advertising machine grew, Google built an ecosystem of quality services capable of attracting millions of users.

In the first wave, corporate products came, such as specialized research for the business environment, in 2002.

Two years later, Gmail came along, first for testers and launched for everyone in 2007. The following year, Chrome was born, one of the main internet browsers. The productivity applications now embedded throughout the Google system, such as the digital calendar, document editor, spreadsheets and presentations, came in 2009.

In 2006, the company purchased YouTube, a video sharing platform used around the world and which today also functions as a streaming service for music, paid films and other audiovisual content services.

However, Google’s biggest acquisition during this period was digital advertising company DoubleClick, AdSense’s main competitor. The European Union assessed at the time that the purchase would not harm the companies’ market.

DoubleClick became the leader in this market at the beginning of this millennium by collecting user information from different websites, through so-called cookies — a standard file that stores data during a visit to a virtual address. DoubleClick used this to target ads based on the target person’s behavior.

This technology allowed Google to expand its data collection model and fine-tune content targeting.

The last clear move in the consolidation of the empire in 2008 was the leadership in the development of the Android operating system — present in cell phones from brands such as Samsung, Motorola and Xiaomi, it is the main competitor of iOS, the system used in Apple’s iPhones.

In 2014, mobile devices surpassed personal computers as the main means of accessing the internet in the world, according to consultancy ComScore. Today, Android accounts for 71% of the cell phone operating system market.

On smartphones, Google collects, in addition to user identification data, information about the use of each application or service used on the device. “Before collection, the operating system notifies and asks for consent,” says the company. You can consult the data that Google collects at this link.

In response to the attention economy model, governments and society began to demand more transparency and privacy. In this movement, websites began to publish whether they use cookies and also privacy policies. Google itself announced, in 2022, that it would stop using third-party cookies next year and has been testing alternatives for its advertising system ever since.

“Google today has enough data to target its ads to survive after lawmakers do away with cookies. Old media is the least prepared,” says writer Jeff Jarvis.

GOOGLE IN POLITICS

This dominance over the attention market and data on the internet also guided Google’s relationship with governments.

In 2020, the search giant, along with other big techs such as Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon and Facebook, had to attend sessions of the American Congress to clarify suspicions of anti-competitive strategies and broad monopoly power, also affecting the political dimension of the country.

The product of these hearings was a 449-page report created by the Chamber of Representatives, stating that all companies abused their market power, and recommending a total reformulation of these companies’ business models.

The video platform worried the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) due to the lack of transparency in moderation and the financial incentives for producers of extremist content — misinformation gives an audience.

Also included are the company’s threats to withdraw services across the world in response to the regulation of online content dissemination.

In Australia, for example, the search giant threatened to leave the country if the bill forcing platforms to pay media outlets for the use of news content moved forward. In Canada, the company removed links to news from search results and other products when a law requiring big tech companies to pay for journalistic content came into force. It also attempted to circumvent European Union data protection law.

In these cases, Google sent warnings to users that the legislation put the “free services” offered by the platform in these countries at risk.

In Brazil, in turn, Google launched an offensive against PL 2630, known as PL das Fake News, emails, screenshots and reports obtained by Sheetand suggested a survey of NetLab.

Those who used the search engine came across a link right below the search box, with the words: “The Fake News Bill can make your internet worse.” The link directed to a Google blog post with numerous criticisms of the project, which was not voted on after the campaign, and has no date for returning to the agenda.

At the time, Google told Sheet which did not privilege any link on the internet, which would include the company’s own links. “Our ranking systems apply consistently to all web pages, including those run by Google.”

This September, the company began responding to the largest antitrust trial in history over billion-dollar agreements with mobile phone operators and others that helped make Google the default search engine on most cell phones in the world.

Anya Schiffrin, professor of technology, media and communications at Columbia University (in New York), states that the relationship with government and society has always been a pillar of Google’s business. “So much so that Google’s first chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is an experienced lobbyist.”

Schmidt led Google during its business rise between 2001 and 2011. He then continued as chairman of the board of Alphabet, the holding company that controls Google, until 2019. He left the company permanently in 2020 to dedicate himself to US military projects involving technology.

Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s chief executive since 2015, now heads Google. In 2017, the company redirected its focus from smartphones to artificial intelligence. While almost all Google products feature AI, the tech giant’s main hope so far is Bard, a model similar to ChatGPT. The results of this bet, however, are yet to come.