25 years Google
Instead of "google," we could now also "backrub" or "whatbox" if other name ideas had prevailed. But in September 1997, Larry Page registered google.com as a domain name. A spelling mistake is said to have been the inspiration.
It's the birthday of a world-changing word: 25 years ago, the course was set for "googling" to become a synonym for Internet searching. It could have turned out differently. When Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing a search engine in 1996, it was initially called Backrub - back massage in German. It was a playful reference to the pioneering basic idea that hits are more relevant if there are more links - backlinks - for them.
However, after only a few months, Page and Brin came to the conclusion that a successful search engine needed a catchier name. At times, they favored "The Whatbox," as noted Silicon Valley journalist Steven Levy wrote in his book on Google history. One September day in 1997, however, a roommate of Page's tossed around the term "Googol," the mathematical name for a 1 with 100 zeros. Page liked the word. According to legend, the roommate typed the misspelling "Google" into the search for available domain names. It was still free - and within a few hours, Google.com was taken by Page.
But then it took almost a year before Google was registered as a company on September 4, 1998 - to cash a check for $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas von Bechtolsheim. The mission: to organize all the information in the world and make it accessible to everyone. The credo, which is now no longer mentioned: "Don't be evil" - do no harm. At first, the servers ran out of the student dormitory; as their first office, Page and Brin looked for a garage in the heart of Silicon Valley, as befits their status. Their landlady, Susan Wojcicki, now runs the video subsidiary YouTube.
Eric Schmidt appointed as manager
Page was the company's first CEO - but investors were not comfortable leaving the fast-growing business to two founders who were not even 30 years old. So in 2001, the experienced manager Eric Schmidt was brought in as a kind of "adult supervisor" at Google. For ten years, until a mature Page took the helm again, the company's fortunes were steered by a kind of troika. Schmidt was the head of the group - but the founders had the freedom, for example, to buy the start-up behind today's market-leading smartphone system Android without being asked, as he later recalled.
Just as innovative as the search engine algorithm was Google's idea of how to earn money with it: with small ads in the vicinity of the hits - which match what the user is looking for. Users only have to pay if they click on the ads, and the exact price is determined in an auction process.
With such mini-deals, Google's size can rake in billions. Despite all the newly added activities, search ads are still considered the basis of Google's business - and also of the parent company Alphabet as a whole. Last quarter, the parent company generated total revenue of around $69.7 billion (67.2 billion Swiss francs), of which a good $56.3 billion was Google's advertising revenue. Long-time Google CEO Sundar Pichai also took over the leadership position in the parent company from Page.
Even in the early years, it became clear that Google's ambitions were not limited to Internet search. True to its goal of organizing all the world's information, it began scanning books on a large scale. It was in this project that Google's founders first got a bloody nose with their do-gooder intentions. Authors and publishers saw their copyrights violated and their business threatened, and took legal action. After that, GoogleBooks made slow progress.
Criticism from different sides
Further conflicts followed. Media companies accused Google of destroying their business base by distributing news for free. Review services such as Yelp criticized the search engine for sucking up their content - which left users stuck with Google. Price search engines saw themselves at a disadvantage.
EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has already cracked down three times. In 2017, there was a fine of €2.4 billion with allegations of unfair competition in shopping search. This was followed in July 2018 by a record fine of €4.34 billion for Google's conduct in Android. Eight months later, 1.49 billion euros were added because, in the Commission's view, Google had improperly hindered other providers in search engine advertising in the "AdSense for Search" service. But Google digested the amounts with ease.
After Europe, however, politicians in the U.S. from both the Republican and Democratic parties are now taking aim at Google over competition. Under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in October alleging that Google was illegally protecting its dominant position in Internet search and related advertising. The company rejects the accusations.
Fears about data protection also arise time and again. Does Google now know too much about its users? Almost a decade ago, the idea of the Google Glass computer glasses ultimately failed because of concerns that their wearers could film others unnoticed. Google learned its lesson: In the case of a pair of glasses currently being tested, which can display text in foreign languages as a translation for the wearer, it immediately says that it does not record videos. (sda.)
