London - Hotbot,
AltaVista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos… all are (or were) perfectly capable
of finding stuff on the internet for us. But fate had other plans and
these days we do not Yahoo something, and we don’t plain old look it up
either.
Nope. If we want to know something
now, we Google it – that noun-to-verb transition the final signifier of
the dominance of the search engine celebrating its 14th birthday this
week.
But though Google has assets of
about $73 billion and was founded by two young men while they were still
at college, no one has yet seen fit to make a film called The Search
Engine, and therefore little is known about the inner workings of this
global giant.
Some might have heard its original
mission statement: “To organise the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.” Others may know that its unofficial
company slogan is “Don’t be evil”. But none of this is crucial to the
firm’s 86 percent global market share.
So what is the secret of Google’s
success? Sure, it looks nice. Of course, it’s fast. And certainly, it
does nice little interactive graphics on its home page from time to
time.
But these are probably not why
most of us choose Google over, say, its Microsoft-owned competitor Bing
(4 percent global market share).
Could
it be that even in the shiny digital age we are all creatures of habit
and once we get used to something, we tend to stick with it?
Seems so. Though as some wags
pointed out following the Kate topless news story recently, the world’s
most popular search engine should think about changing its name to Go
Ogle.
And now that we have this tool of infinite power, this all-knowing oracle, at our fingertips what do we use it for?
Let’s turn to Google itself to
find out. Type “Who”, “What”, “Why” and “Where” into that little search
bar and let’s see what the predictive text below tells us about the
world we live in.
The answers? “Who unfollowed me
[on Twitter]?” , “What’s on TV?”, “Why is the sky blue?” and, bizarrely,
“Where is Chuck Norris”.
So now we know. And for that, thank Google. – The Independent
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