In Google we trust? Big Brother thinks so
October 09, 2005 Edition 1
George Hopkin
Conspiracy theorists: hold on to something steady for a moment. As of May this year, search engine behemoth Google can not only find the latest Britney tunes, it can also locate some users via their cellphone and, if it wanted to, serve up a satellite photograph of their exact location.
Not Big Brother enough for you? Well, the US search giant will also let you track down the nearest limousine. Just in case you need a head start on finding Britney.
That particular scenario might seem a bit far fetched but it's based on Google's very real, ever-expanding technological reach, something critics have called the creeping Googlisation of the web.
We'd better hope Google sticks to its informal corporate motto: Don't be evil.
The battle against evil has never been easy. The little search project that became a verb has incurred the wrath of governments, religious groups and some of the world's most famous leaders. And as far as most people are concerned, it has emerged the plucky champion of the digital age.
But don't forget that Google is now a publicly traded company valued at almost $78 billion (R508 billion). Can the company stay on the path of internet righteousness when investors come clamouring for ever larger returns on their investments?
Google emerged from modest beginnings and its history is a classic Silicon Valley rags-to-riches tale. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford University in 1995 and overcame an initial dislike for one another to work on a new way of ranking information retrieved from a world wide web expanding at an overwhelming rate.
The pair called their first search engine BackRub, a nod to its ability to analyse back links to a particular web site. This new take on assessing a site's relevance was revolutionary and attracted a core following of net users who wanted a clean interface and a search engine that just worked, with none of the hype and overkill the then all-powerful dot-com portals were piling into their own offerings.
For two years Sergey and Brin tinkered with, tweaked and steadily improved their technology, and went as far as building their first data centre in Page's dorm room.
It was time to get serious about search. Brin set up a business office and the students started calling on would-be clients to sell them a licence to their new technology, which had by then been renamed Google.
They also started knocking on the doors of potential investors. Their efforts paid off when they landed a now-legendary meeting with Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.
"We met him very early one morning in Palo Alto", said Brin, according to Google's website. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, "Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a cheque?"
The $100 000 (R652 000) cheque was made out to Google Inc. Unfortunately there was no such thing. Google may have been the name Sergey and Brin were using, but they had not formed an actual company, so the cheque could not be cashed.
But buoyed by this success the two students set up a legal corporation and also secured additional funding from family and friends over the next few weeks, eventually reaching the magic $1 million (R6.5 million) mark.
The fledgling Google and its three employees could now move into its first office - a friend's garage. Just five months later in February 1999 the company had outgrown this space (by then it employed eight people) and moved to a new home in Menlo Park.
Now things really started to take off. Google was hiring key employees as fast as it could and in June of 1999 announced that another office move was necessary. According to Google corporate lore, space had become so cramped that employees had to tuck their chairs in to leave space for their co-workers to stand up.
In August 1999 the staff made the move to the so-called Googleplex, the Mountain View headquarters where Google remains to this day. It was here that the corporate culture helped develop one of the most distinctive business environments.
An informal atmosphere involving hockey games, lava lamps and wandering pet dogs permeated the entire "campus," while the Grateful Dead's former chef fed staffers his own brand of health-conscious brain food.
Most written accounts of the Googleplex paint a picture of hedonistic geekdom, but some visitors have commented on an ice-cold vibe which underlies the whole thing. Just because the place is festooned with large rubber exercise balls doesn't mean the company isn't deadly serious about its business.
And Google has to take things seriously - in March of 2003, lawyers representing the Church of Scientology pressured the company to remove links to a site critical of the controversial religious order. Today the links are back in the Google database, but for a time they were indeed surpressed.
Later that year, UK businesswoman Anita Roddick referred to John Malkovich as a "vomitous worm" in her online journal - and had her advertising campaign on Google suspended as a result. She had taken exception to Malkovich's threat to kill journalist Robert Fisk over his Middle East reports.
The Body Shop founder was reasonably philosophical about the incident, which she described as a major mistake, but went on to say: "I still think Google's policy of not allowing political advocacy ads is misguided, impossible to administer with any kind of fairness, and a scary step toward restricting the free marketplace of ideas."
No wonder Brin told tech magazine Wired: "I do get fairly stressed. I'd like to feel a little less scrutinised."
But Google is just going to have to live with scrutiny - and more of it as the company continues acquiring, developing and expanding new technologies. Some critics wonder if Google might use its new knowledge of exactly where users are to issue highly targeted ads. If so, would this be a clever business strategy or outrageous invasion of privacy? - featurenet.co.za
