In 1998, Google began humbly, formally incorporated in a Menlo Park garage, providing search results from a server housed in Lego bricks. It had a straightforward goal: make the poorly indexed World Wide Web accessible to humans. Its success was based on an algorithm that analyzed the linking structure of the internet itself to evaluate what web pages are most reputable and useful. But founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had a much more ambitious goal: They wanted to organize the world’s information.
Twenty years later, they have built a company going far beyond even that lofty goal, providing individuals and businesses alike with email, file sharing, web hosting, home automation, smartphones and countless other services. The playful startup that began as a surveyor of the web has become an architect of reality, creating and defining what its billions of users find, see, know or are even aware of.
Google controls more than 90 percent of the global search market, driving users and companies alike to design websites that appeal to the company’s algorithms. If Google can’t find a piece of information, that knowledge simply doesn’t exist for Google users. If it’s not on Google, does it really exist at all?
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