The power of the hunger for knowledge
Conor Pope on the rise and rise of the internet search engine
Google employees at the company's booth at Frankfurt Book Fair last October. Photograph: Getty Images
Google's numbers are absolutely mind-boggling. It is the fastest growing company in history and although it is only eight years old, it's already valued at more than $130 billion (EUR98 billion). With astonishing speed it searches through hundreds of millions of web pages 12,000 times every second and handles more than one billion different search requests from all over the world each day.
Its two founders are still young but are now worth a combined total of more than $25 billion. And it's only really starting. Already the most dominant search engine and one of the most powerful web-based e-mail providers, Google has aggressively positioned itself at the vanguard of Web 2.0 - the next generation net space which will be made up of user-created content such as blogs, music and videos.
It recently hoovered up the video sharing website YouTube for $1.6 billion in stock - chump change at the Googleplex headquarters in California. Speaking after the takeover was announced, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said YouTube's "exciting and powerful media platform" complemented "Google's mission to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". It is a bold mission, but one the company is well on the way to completing.
The company was born, like all great internet start-ups, in a Palo Alto garage but the project had its genesis in a much more rarefied atmosphere. In 1996, two Stanford University PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set about proving that a search engine which analysed the relationships between websites instead of simply counting the frequency with which particular search terms were mentioned on a site, would produce better results.
The idea was simple - pages with more links to them from other relevant web pages would probably be more relevant. It was also right on the money. The two students registered the domain google.com on September 14th, 1997, and the company was incorporated a year later at a friend's garage in California, with a capitalisation of just over £1 million.
In the eight years since then it has become the most comprehensive - and the laziest - research tool ever invented. It has grown into an online oracle and, if handled correctly, can find the answer to almost any question you care to ask it in seconds. To "Google" has become a verb and Googlewhacking a frustrating game, and it continues to justify the hype by reporting truly staggering growth every financial quarter.
It is also an advertiser's dream because of its ability to place precisely targeted advertisements in front of every searcher, every time.
Despite all the money it is making, Google makes much of its "chilled-out" corporate culture. There are fuzzball tables in the lobby of its headquarters and its engineers are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their time at work on projects that interest them.
Its website is peppered with suitably anti-establishment statements. "You can be serious without a suit"; "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun"; "You can make money without doing evil".
Although "Don't be evil" is its most well-known mantra, there may be a dark side to Google's remarkable dominance. If information is power, then Google is quickly becoming all-powerful. It probably has access to more information about what the world is looking for than any other single organisation.
Everything you have ever searched for on Google has been stored on the company's servers and can be traced back to your computer. Every video you have ever watched using its platforms has quietly been noted, and if you use Gmail - the company's free e-mail service - then the content and addresses of every message you have ever sent or received is also being held in perpetuity by the company.
An article in the New York Times last year showed just how much information Google keeps and how it can be used when it highlighted a North Carolina strangulation trial at which evidence was given that the defendant had searched for the words "neck" and "snap" using Google.
"The data was taken from the defendant's computer, prosecutors say. But it might have come directly from Google, which - unbeknownst to many users - keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals," the New York Times wrote.
This is the kind of data that a prying government or a shadowy organisation would kill for, not literally perhaps. Early this year the US department of justice took the company to court in an effort to make it comply with a subpoena for "the text of each search string entered onto Google's search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query)". It said it needed the information to step up its fight against the proliferation of pornography on the web.
Google earned kudos amongst advocates of online privacy by vigorously fighting the motion and - recognising the privacy implications of granting the US government's request - the court ruled partially in Google's favour. But while the battle was won, few believe the war is over.
According to New York Times opinion writer Adam Cohen, the US government can still gain access to Google's massive data storehouses simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. "Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages . . . It is hard to believe most Google users . . . have thought much about the government's ability to read their search history and stored e-mail messages without them knowing it."
Google's truly remarkable reach is certainly something that is worth thinking about, at the very least. While it may be doing no evil now, given how far it has travelled in the last decade who can say where it will be 10 years from now.
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