How Google Has Changed Our Lives
“Google’s official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we’re just getting started.” – An expired version of Google’s When is Google’s birthday? page.
As it turned out, AOL’s and Yahoo!’s business models were partially wrong: paying for and owning content doesn’t generate as much revenue as simply owning the first step of accessing it, and selling ads on it. And today, what’s easier: to scroll down a list of bookmarks, or just type the site’s name into a Google search box?
A digital video recorder allows individuals or families to watch TV on their schedule. A mobile phone connects people virtually anywhere they are. Google affected society by aggregating an overwhelmingly vast quantity of information in a single virtual space, with tangible cultural, economic, and legal effects.
Today, a publication like The New York Times can spend thousands of dollars researching a major story. But a major blog can simply rewrite the story, with the barest attribution, and receive a significant boost in revenue from the traffic and links it in turn receives—which Google values, and assigns importance to. In many cases, the blog is more important than the source material, according to Google.
That same interconnectedness rapidly disseminates memes, whether they be relatively harmless ones like the “five things you don’t know about me” or more insidious, such as “Al Gore said he invented the Internet.” In the latter case, the only counterattack to a prevalent meme is to start a countermeme. The hope is that it too receives enough attention to warrant a high enough ranking in Google that unbiased observers will see it and make up their own minds.
Likewise, by phrasing the query with the right parameters, a wealth of information can be dug up via Google: unannounced product information hiding on a corporation’s Web site or in government records; a list of John Denver’s albums; credit card numbers; MP3s; legal settlements; photos of Britney Spears; campaign contributions; crime data—the list goes on. It’s all just data; the significance and context is assigned by the user, not Google. And that means the world’s population has realized that the dark side of having such a treasure trove of information at one’s disposal is the realization that your information may be at someone else’s. That, of course, has placed a greater value on privacy.
But that’s just Google’s search engine. Read the rest of this entry »