Google Looks to the Future After 20 Years of Searching

On Monday, October 2, Google celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over these two decades, Google has transformed from a better way to use the internet into a search engine that has become part of the daily lives of many people, with its name becoming a verb. The 20th anniversary was celebrated at an event in San Francisco, focusing on the future of online search, where it promised to announce some interesting and unexpected news soon. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, developed a very effective method for classifying and searching content on the internet during their studies at Stanford University. They designed software that considers not only the number of keywords used but also other factors like the relationship between web pages to determine their ranking in each search. Google was launched in September 1998 in a rented garage in Menlo Park, Northern California. Its name is inspired by the term 'googol,' which in mathematics refers to the number one followed by a hundred zeros. It is said that at one point, its founders intended to sell Google for one million dollars, but the deal fell through. Later, Google moved its headquarters to Mountain View, where it remains today. In August 2004, Google became a publicly traded company, with shares sold at $85, and its stock price is now over a thousand dollars. From the beginning, Google announced that its mission was to provide access to all the information in the world. The company significantly increased its revenue by displaying commercial advertisements on its website based on information users disclose about themselves and receiving advertising fees from companies whose sites users visit. Following that, it designed and launched various tools and services, including maps and navigation, Gmail, the Chrome web browser, and the Android operating system, which is provided free to mobile phone and tablet manufacturers. Another successful product is the Pixel smartphones, which operate on the Android system and are used by many mobile phone manufacturers. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube, which had only been active for 18 months, for $1.65 billion. This price seemed astronomical at the time, but with the shift of much of the entertainment industry to the internet, it proved to be a very clever decision by Google. The company has also invested in developing new technologies such as self-driving cars and high-altitude balloons to expand internet coverage in remote areas. However, it has not had much success in other areas, such as Google Glass or Google Plus, which was intended to compete with Facebook. In October 2015, the company's structure changed, establishing a new company called Alphabet, with Google, Waymo, and the health sciences division called Verily, among other assets, becoming subsidiaries of Alphabet. Google is currently one of the main players in research and development in artificial intelligence, with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft as its main competitors in this field. Despite efforts to diversify its economic activities, the majority of Alphabet's revenue, which has over 80,000 employees worldwide, still comes from advertising. Experts predict that this year, Google and Facebook will together account for more than 57% of digital advertising revenue in the U.S. In the second quarter of 2018, Google announced that despite paying a €4.34 billion fine to the European Union, the company's profit was $3.2 billion. Google's growth has led governments and regulatory bodies, especially in Europe, to become sensitive to the company's dominance over internet searches, digital advertising, and mobile operating systems. There are concerns that Alphabet prioritizes earning revenue from users' personal information over protecting their privacy. Google has also been accused of attracting audiences from other news networks by displaying news and reports from other media in its search engine, significantly reducing their revenue. Google is among the internet companies criticized and pressured for better protection against the spread of fake news. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, like many Republicans in the country, has claimed that Google ranks conservative viewpoints lower in its search engine. According to a report from the French news agency.