Image: APA/AFP/Josh Edelson
Google celebrates its birthday on September 27, the day the search engine was officially launched. The fourth of September is of course the day on which the American mathematicians Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search engine company “Google Inc.” signed up to cash a check for $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas von Bechtolsheim.
Google has long been the dominant search engine on the Internet and a money printing machine. Nine out of ten search queries are “googled”. That means enormous market power. In addition to web search, the group also includes: e-mail, digital maps, a cloud infrastructure, YouTube as the largest video platform, a fitness tracker, the Bard AI system.
Last year, the EU Commission imposed a record fine of 4.1 billion euros on Google’s approach to really accommodating its services everywhere. Partners of Google’s Android operating system also had to offer other services. According to the EU Commission, this is exploiting a dominant position in the market. Google and its parent company Alphabet have consistently achieved this dominance in this quarter of a century. The group is also currently in the sights of competition watchdogs in Europe.
While the original mission was to organize the information in the world and make it accessible to everyone, Google now knows a lot about its customers. The information that is offered to users without being checked is also criticized. For a few days, the large information platforms have had to take stricter action against false information.
Google has made many business models possible for others in the first place and has become the largest advertising seller in the world even with the ads in the search results area. The challenge for the next few years will be how Google can secure its search engine despite the use of artificial intelligence.
In 2022, the Alphabet subsidiary Google generated revenues of $280 billion, leaving $60 billion in profit.
Source: Nachrichten
