WHAT IS IT?
Seriously? What is Google? Where have you been the past twelve years? Google is everything. It’s a noun, it’s a verb, I’m sure it’s been used as an adjective, and it’s probably going to be an adverb (Googly) pretty soon.
Google was founded in Menlo Park in 1998. The company’s primary business on the date of its founding was Internet search—a fiercely competitive market. The industry battlefield is strewn with the bodies of high-tech luminaries and mysterious strangers—Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Finding stuff on the Internet is big business, and Google is at the top.
Imagine the Internet as a vast junkyard filled with pornography and poorly written editorials in which people call each other Nazis. Buried in that junkyard is a lot of very valuable stuff, but you have to dig to find it. To dig, you need a bulldozer, but you’re not allowed to drive the bulldozer. Instead, you have to scream to the driver of the bulldozer what you’re searching for and hope he understands what you said over the sound of his engine. What makes it worse is that 10 million other people are also screaming requests at him. More often than not, you’re going to end up with a confusing pile of nonsense. That’s what search engines were like before Google.
The trick to building a better search engine is to ensure that the software that drives it can understand and interpret a request, even when it is poorly phrased or badly spelled. It’s not easy. If you’ve ever worked retail, you know that most people don’t know what they’re really looking for. Try mediating that interaction through dumb software and you can see why the people who develop search engine software are hyperfocused, anal-retentive weirdos with a high degree of psychic potential.
Delivering useful information is an extremely valuable service, but making money off it is difficult. Google figured out, like everyone else, that the money’s in advertising. Google’s innovation was to target ads based on your search terms. Searching for a way to hang yourself? Google has a brand of rope they’d like to recommend. In short order, Google went from being a search engine to being an ad-placement agency. They pay close attention to every term dropped into their search engine.
Google isn’t in the business of selling you anything, they’re in the business of selling you to their advertisers. The more you use their search engine, the more they know about you, and the more niches into which they can shoehorn ads. They will stop at nothing to make every piece of information in the world searchable. More importantly, those bits of data will be tied to targeted ads.