ORGANIZING THE WORLD’S INFORMATION today Google is the number one search engine in the United States and in the world The company has more than 72,000 employees It made more than 19 billion in profit in 2017 It owns YouTube the number one online video site It owns the Android smartphone operating system which is used by more than two billion people every month 1 Google has worked with other companies to design smartphones and Chromebooks slimmed-down laptops that use Google’s own web browser Chrome From its earliest days Google has been known for innovation Even now as one of the world’s largest companies it still pushes the boundaries of technology Google employees Google has gone from a company started by a pair of college students to a multibillion-dollar company that controls access to a vast amount of information 5
work to make self-driving cars widely available Google engineers work with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA to help discover new planets One of the company’s projects is to build a system of huge balloons to give internet access to the whole world People around the world run an average of more than 40,000 internet searches on Google com every second That’s more than three billion searches every day 2 Each one of those people is looking for some specific information and Google’s technology scours the internet to find the answers users are seeking Of all the online search traffic in the world in 2017 more than 80 percent of it was through Google 3 Users can search for and within scholarly articles and books news items videos or across the entire World Wide Web at once Google now officially a part of the parent company Alphabet Inc is one of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies It provides billions of people with software services and free access to the world’s collected knowledge It may be surprising then to learn that Google began as a student project in the mid-1990s at Stanford University How did Google become the tech titan it is today 6
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 GOOGLE SEARCHES 1998 2016 BILLIONS 4 3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 THE INTERNET AND THE WEB The idea of the internet developed in the mid-1900s At the time computers were huge expensive and complex Only laboratories certain government agencies and a few universities had them Researchers in these places wanted to find a way for their computers to communicate with each other They created a closed network using telephone lines and created software protocols to transfer data between computers 7
