Whenever a Google doodle is clicked on, Google directs us to the details of the doodle and why it is being celebrated. In this case, the redirection is to a search result page on Google. September 27 1998, Google Inc was started by two Stanford university students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The only asset they started working with were four computers and an investor’s $100,000 bet on their belief. The belief was that a search engine on the Internet could change the world and so did it.
However, as a company, they filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, and the registration of the domain Google.com was on September 15, 1998. finally on September 27, same here, Google was officially born.
Google, in these 13 years has seen many competitions and have been successful in dominating the search world over the Internet, but with its growth, there has been an increase of legislative scrutinies even. For its competitiveness, it started as a competitor to the then search engine giant, Yahoo, and today its way ahead in terms of market share and revenue as compared to Yahoo. But its diversions have led to a number of other competitors, who have outsmarted Google. A few on the list are Groupon and the social networking giant Facebook.
Google, with its dominance has been famous for a few good deeds, but has even been infamous for a number of strategies which have been adopted by Google. At a recent congressional hearing, US senators remarked that Google Inc has evolved to become a dominant and potentially anti-competitive force on the Internet. A similar thought was noted by Republican Senator Mike Lee, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, who said, “Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the Internet.” He further added that the head of the Google’s search ranking team has termed Google as the biggest kingmaker on Earth.
The accusation has majorly been from the related businesses such as travel search, as the rivals have called ‘foul’ on the strategies and tactics adopted by Google to discourage competition. This has even brought the Federal Trade Commission into the picture, as they are working on the charges on Google to note whether Google actually manipulates its search result rankings to favor its own products or no. This point can go against Google as it holds a dominating share of more than 90 per cent of the search share, according to Internet statistics firm StatCounter.
Looking at the overall aspect, Google has been more on the ‘evil’ side than the ‘angel’ one, but one has to agree that Google has helped a number of small and smaller than the small businesses to grow and compete with the biggies in their field.
Entering its teen, Google might be wishing for the problems to subside and generate better rating for its own self.