How will Google’s innovation continue beyond its 20th year?
As Google celebrates its 20th anniversary, Gary Marchionini asks where the global tech giant can go next amid increasing scrutiny about its ethics, data privacy issues and potential for political exploitation in this crossposting from The Conversation.
As millions of people came online in the late 1990s they needed help figuring out what each webpage was about, and how to find what they were looking for. Web indexes and search engines sprang up. When Google was founded in September 1998, it had to compete with the information retrieval algorithms and techniques – nicknamed “secret sauce” – used by Lycos, Yahoo and other companies.
Technically speaking, Google added two innovations: highly efficient processes for crawling webpages to index their text, and a new way of ranking a page’s relevance based on the number and quality of pages that linked to it. In addition, its interface was refreshingly clean: In an internet then pervaded by pages with lists of lists, Google offered a spare alternative, with just a box to type search terms and a “Search” button.
Even more startling was Google’s confidence in its abilities. The company offered a second button, whimsically labeled “I’m feeling lucky,” which would take users directly to the webpage that was the top result – skipping the step of listing possible search results for a user to choose from. It also sought to be a different kind of technology company, early on adopting a straightforward corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.” Two decades into Google’s history, the power of search is still paramount: Entire businesses and professions are built around crafting internet content that will rise to the top of its search results.
Screenshot of the earliest version of the Google search engine, as stored by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
