How did Google gets so big, that the company is usually being investigated by governments worldwide?
Well, it's a wild ride.
The whole thing started off, as a dissertation by two students.
And now Google is a thing, everyone knows of, and almost everyone uses.
So let's dig into how this happened.
[MUSIC]
This is the rundown.
skip around if you want watch things out of order, I don't mind and this thing is is we start off in 1995 Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborate on a dissertation to figure out a better way to find things online.
The idea hits them.
The measure of importance of a site is based on the number of sites that link to that site.
To find that out, you have to look at a site and then go backwards.
That's why Paige called the system backrub.
What do you call this web page ranking system?
Page Rank.
And apparently it's named after Larry Page and no, I'm not making that up.
Alright, so page and Brin have this idea and start shopping it around two search companies.
They meet up with Yahoo.
Yahoo passes.
They meet up with AltaVista that King of search at the time.
Alta Vista passes.
As an aside, AltaVista had difficulty because the bosses thought there was no way to make money from a search engine.
Yeah, that happened.
Then they meet up with excite the excite CEO sees how good backrub is and passes.
Why it's too good.
If you want to make money online in the late 1990s you need people to stay on your page.
Backrub send people away too quickly.
So Paige and Brian go ahead and make their own site.
They dropped the name Backrub in favour of Google, which is a play on the mathematical term Googleplex along the way.
Google is setting up its garage office at the home of an Intel manager named Susan Mo jQi.
Susan is currently the CEO of YouTube By the way, they're also picking up a lot of people who are brilliant, including Marissa Meyer and Ers hutzler.
I apologize for my pronunciation.
Anyway, furs wound up rewriting the search engine to be fast.
Because why not?
So how is Google planning to make money off of a search engine?
The original plan was three streams of revenue, one licensing that search to other places to selling a hardware product that allowed companies to search their own operations quickly.
And third, sell ads.
Some of the company thought that selling ads was a distraction.
Well, we know how this turns out.
The engineer who created Google's ad system was quoted as saying I hate ads.
Page and Brin also disliked traditional advertising.
Google Ads needed to be different.
Google's main idea for ads was to target them to search in a world of pop ups and banner ads.
Google ads would be small blocks of text.
Sergey Brin said our goal is to maximize the user experience, not maximize the revenue per search.
Now it's the year 2000 Google signs a deal to handle Yahoo search Yahoo was originally using technology licensed from a company called Inktomi as a part of the Google Yahoo deal.
This search was labeled, powered by Google, and, had Google logos on search.
Without this branding, Google loses a ton of visibility.
Late in 2000.
Google ad words arrives.
This will become the main source of revenue for Google for years.
Google's ads, were based on quality.
Companies could not buy the top spot.
ads that were successful in getting people to click would get priority.
Google then turned to auctions to sell ad space, which ticked off a lot of advertisers.
Google also reinvented the auction system while they were at it.
In the past, people would make bids.
Let's say the winning bid was $10.
But the next highest was $9.
The winner had to pay $10.
So Google rethought it.
If the next highest bid is $9 the winner pays only $9.01 2001.
Google needs a CEO, page and Brin had their sights set on one guy.
That guy's name Steve Jobs.
Yeah, for real jobs at this point is the CEO of both Apple and Pixar.
Page and Brin have meetings with Steve Jobs.
Intel's Andy Grove, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and others.
Eventually Eric Schmidt is tapped as CEO.
Schmidt had been the CTO at Sun and the CEO of Novell.
Schmitz also gets Sheryl Sandberg as their head of ad operations.
She was the former Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Treasury in the Clinton administration.
2002 this is the year when Google gets a deal with America Online.
This also happens to be the first year Google is profitable.
When there's money, there's big acquisitions, and new products.
2003, Google buys Blogger to put its ads outside of its search engine.
In the same year, Google buys a company named Applied Semantics that as patented tech That understands organises and extract knowledge from websites and information repositories in a way that mimics human thought.
This ends up in Google AdSense.
Google also decides to work on its own web email service.
In October 2004 CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google is not going into the phone business, but we're gonna make sure Google is on those phones.
This is the same year Google goes public.
2005 Google wants to know more about its users.
So Google picks up a company called urging for $20 million.
This becomes integral to Google Analytics, the tool that can be used by people to understand its customers better.
In the same year, Google buys Android 2006.
Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion.
This was a huge risk at the time.
YouTube was facing a lot of legal issues because people With post copyrighted works on the site.
At the time of the purchase, it was thought that Google could perhaps identify and remove copyrighted works.
interesting idea.
A New York Times article mentioned that YouTube was kinda similar to Napster.
Napster was killed over copyright issues.
So here we have Google paying over a billion dollars for YouTube and its ton of legal problems.
However, YouTube had a 46% market share of online video at the time 2007.
Google buys double click for $3.1 billion.
This is Google's biggest acquisition at the time.
Double click is an online ad company.
Eric Schmidt explained the deal saying the most compelling argument.
It's accelerating our display advertising business.
The deal drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, but the FTC let it slide still in 2007.
This is also the year Google's products show up on the iPhone similar to the Yahoo deal in the past this put Google's apps in the faces of every person who used an iPhone for years and also Google search was in safari.
In 2008 things started getting sour between Google and Apple Because of that Android thing, then the first android phone pops up.
It's the HTC dream, also known as the T Mobile g one.
How Apple and Google were best buddies is a whole other video.
Let me know in the comments if you're interested in that.
So let's take a giant step back to see what's happened.
A company is started by two students.
Who think things can be done in a better way.
They bring in some amazing minds to help them.
When a problem pops up.
People are empowered to do something about it.
When managers would reach out for partnerships or a working relationship, patient brain would offer to purchase companies.
They also figured out a way to make money on something that was thought to be a loser of a product search.
Google gets huge visibility with the deals through Yahoo, AOL, and Apple.
Most of all Google's products work.
If you want to look for something, there was one place that did a better than everyone else, and it was Google.
It took tons of iterations and breaking stuff.
To make Google search and advertising businesses take off.
This leads to Google being flushed with cash acquisitions become easier and easier.
They go on to pick up Motorola Mobility ways nest deep Mic drop camp.
Parts of HTC and Fitbit, and those are just the big names.
A lot of the acquisitions became part of bigger Google projects like maps, email, YouTube and Android.
So how did Google get so big?
Well, because of everything I just told you, but if you want to know more, check out the book in the Plex by Steven Levy.
It is excellent.
So is Google a monopoly in the legal sense That's for the courts to decide, not me.
But in my opinion, Google has a grip on a number of key markets.
It does face competition go through Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others.
Does Google throw its weight around to keep its products in places?
Yes.
Is it illegal?
Check out all the fines issued against the company worldwide.
One of the larger issues to think about is that for the customer, getting away from using certain Google products is easy.
You don't wanna use Chrome, download something else.
You don't wanna use it search.
How about duct up?
Go.
However, what about all the data that can be collected using Google's ad services?
Maybe there's no escape from Google.
Whew, that was Lots.
Let me know.
If you want to know more about the history of Google and Apple in the comments.
I learned so much trivia as well.
Follow me on Twitter.
I'm Iyaz Akhtar I'm going to share a lot more there on I'm Iyaz Akhtar.
I'll see you online.
And I'm sure Google is watching.
