Google is 20: Rege used, heavily controversial

“Googling” has become synonymous with Internet search. But the company, founded 20 years ago, has long since outgrown the search engine – and triggers not only admiration but also privacy concerns and concerns about competition.

Mountain View / Berlin (dpa) – Google has changed the world. Finding information on the Internet within seconds has become a matter of course over the past 20 years, thanks to the company’s famous formula.

But it also brings with it an unprecedented accumulation of information in the hands of a company – and a market power that, especially in Europe, is increasingly calling for supervisors. With artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and health research, Google and parent company Alphabet also want to set the tone for many future technologies.

Internet search engines have been around before Google . But it was the new approach of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that quickly brought Google forward. Your idea: It should not be an editorially maintained web catalog, but a smart search engine . The relevance of individual websites is reflected in how often they are linked to them (“page rank”).

In the meantime hundreds of factors are contributing to the Google algorithm, which has been further developed by many employees. The first version of their search engine , which was initially called BackRub, programmed Page and Brin from 1996 home. Relatively quickly, it was renamed Google – an allusion to the word “Googol,” the mathematical name for a 1 with 100 zeros.

To be able to redeem a check for $ 100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas von Bechtolsheim , Google was finally registered as a company on September 4, 1998. The mission: To organize all information in the world and to make it accessible to all. The credo, which is now hardly mentioned: “Do not be evil” – do no harm. Page and Brin were the first office to look for a garage in the heart of Silicon Valley . Her landlady, Susan Wojcicki , leads the video daughter YouTube today .

Page was the first CEO – but investors were not comfortable leaving the fast-growing business to the two, not even 30-year-old founders. So in 2001, the experienced manager Eric Schmidt was brought to Google as a kind of “adult supervision” . For ten years, until a ripened page took over the wheel, the fortunes of a kind of “troika” were steered. Although Schmidt was the CEO – but the founders had, for example, the freedom to buy the start-up behind the dominating smartphone system Android , as he later recalled.

As sophisticated as the search engine algorithm was also the Google idea of ​​how to make money with it: with small ads in the field of hits – which fit what the user is looking for. You only have to pay if the advertisement is also clicked on, and the exact price is determined in an auction process.

With such mini deals you can rake in billions with the size of Google . Search Ads are still considered the foundation of Google’s business – and Alphabet as a whole – for all new activity . In the past quarter, the parent company’s total revenue of $ 32.6 billion, of which more than 28 billion advertising revenues from Google .

Already in the first years it became clear that the ambitions of Google are not limited to the Internet search. True to the goal of organizing all the information in the world, people began to scan books on a grand scale. For the first time, the Google founders got a bloody nose on their project with their World Improver intentions. Authors and publishers saw copyright infringement and threatened their business, went to court. Google Books was slow after that.

Further conflicts followed. Media houses accused Google of destroying their business base with the free distribution of news. Rating services like Yelp criticized the search engine sucking in their content – leaving users stuck on Google . Price search machines saw themselves disadvantaged.

EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has already cracked down twice. In 2017, there was a fine of 2.4 billion euros with the allegation of unfair competition in the shopping search. In July, the record fine of 4.34 billion euros for Google’s behavior on Android followed . The amounts digested Google with ease – the requirement to allow more competition on the mobile platform, but could be a bomb under the previous Android business.

And again and again, privacy concerns come up. White Google now too much about its users? The idea of ​​computer glasses Google Glass ultimately failed because of concern that their wearers could film others unnoticed. Only a few weeks ago, the company had to justify that Android phones constantly store location data – even if the users do not want that.

The Internet Group asks users for even more information: The talking Google Assistant is only particularly useful if he can adjust to the specific person. How far Google is in the development of artificial intelligence, the group showed in the spring with the service Duplex, which can imitate human speech to natural-sounding “Umm”. In addition to admiration for the performance of Google developers, this also sparked concerns about a surge in voice robots.

A few days before Google’s birthday, US President Donald Trump made another front. Trump googled news about himself, reportedly receiving loud negative headlines. He then accused Google of manipulating the selection to his disadvantage.

That would have consequences, followed by a barely concealed threat. Google rejected the allegations. One can assume, however, that the Republicans bring the issue back to the table at the next Senate hearing of Internet companies on 5 September.