It’s incredible that it took just 18 years for Google -- the company
reached this milestone of adulthood on Sept. 27 -- to create a market capitalization of more than $530 billion. It’s perhaps even more amazing to recall how the search engine has changed life as we know it.
Google, now a unit of holding parent company Alphabet Inc., began in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Stanford University dorm in 1998 before campus officials asked them to find a real office after the Stanford IT department complained Page and Brin’s were sucking up all the university’s bandwidth.
By the time I joined the company in November of 2001, it was apparent that we were changing the world. As an early employee at Google -- the second attorney hired there -- there were times when shivers ran up my spine thinking about what we were building. Democratizing access to information, and bringing the real world online -- it was an inspiring place to be.
Having grown up in a working class neighborhood, I had to travel to an affluent neighborhood to access a good public library, spending countless Saturday afternoons with volumes of reference books to learn how to apply for financial aid to attend college. In those pre-Internet days, a good library and a kind-hearted librarian were my keys to advancement.
After the printing press, the first major democratization of access to information had been driven a century ago by steel baron Andrew Carnegie. He became the world’s richest man in the late 19th century and then gave it all away, donating $60 million to fund 1,689 public libraries across the United States. To my mind, Google took Carnegie’s vision of putting information in the hands of the general public and put it on steroids, creating a virtual library akin to those found only in sci-fi movies in 1998.
Google indexed the internet extraordinarily well without human intervention, unlike previously curated outlets such as Yahoo! or LexisNexis, and in such a way that the user did not have to know how to use the index or Boolean search methods. Google enabled free searches of words or terms, making all manner of information instantly retrievable even if you did not know where it was housed. With Google, you could find any needle in any haystack at any time. Unlocking that data has indeed been a great equalizer: any individual can arm him or herself with relevant information before seeing a doctor or applying for government assistance, housing or a job.
Google, now a unit of holding parent company Alphabet Inc., began in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Stanford University dorm in 1998 before campus officials asked them to find a real office after the Stanford IT department complained Page and Brin’s were sucking up all the university’s bandwidth.
By the time I joined the company in November of 2001, it was apparent that we were changing the world. As an early employee at Google -- the second attorney hired there -- there were times when shivers ran up my spine thinking about what we were building. Democratizing access to information, and bringing the real world online -- it was an inspiring place to be.
Having grown up in a working class neighborhood, I had to travel to an affluent neighborhood to access a good public library, spending countless Saturday afternoons with volumes of reference books to learn how to apply for financial aid to attend college. In those pre-Internet days, a good library and a kind-hearted librarian were my keys to advancement.
After the printing press, the first major democratization of access to information had been driven a century ago by steel baron Andrew Carnegie. He became the world’s richest man in the late 19th century and then gave it all away, donating $60 million to fund 1,689 public libraries across the United States. To my mind, Google took Carnegie’s vision of putting information in the hands of the general public and put it on steroids, creating a virtual library akin to those found only in sci-fi movies in 1998.
Google indexed the internet extraordinarily well without human intervention, unlike previously curated outlets such as Yahoo! or LexisNexis, and in such a way that the user did not have to know how to use the index or Boolean search methods. Google enabled free searches of words or terms, making all manner of information instantly retrievable even if you did not know where it was housed. With Google, you could find any needle in any haystack at any time. Unlocking that data has indeed been a great equalizer: any individual can arm him or herself with relevant information before seeing a doctor or applying for government assistance, housing or a job.
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