Google turns 20 years old, how was the search engine born?

Google celebrates its 20 years on Monday with an event in San Francisco. Born in September 1998 as a search engine, it became one of the most powerful multinationals in the world, generating billions, but also critics.

In the mid-1990s, Larry Page and Serguei Brin, two students from Stanford University in Silicon Valley, had an idea to improve the Internet search that turned out to be revolutionary and ended up crushing the competition.

The search engines already existed but classified the search results by counting the number of times the searched keywords appeared.

Page and Brin improved the system, analyzing the relationships between the pages, such as the number of links that lead to a particular page, allowing to better determine the objective.

On September 4, 1998, they officially founded Google in a garage in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, California.

The name is a reference to the mathematical term "gogol" or "googol" (gúgol in Spanish), which designates the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

In 2004, it installed its headquarters in Mountain View and Google entered the stock market in August.

Much more than maps

Over the years, the firm launched numerous products: Maps, Gmail messaging, the operating system for Android phones, the Chrome browser ... Google also bought the YouTube video platform in 2006.

At the end of 2015, the group was restructured and created a parent company, Alphabet, which oversees Google and the other subsidiaries, such as Verily (health), Waymo (autonomous cars), Deep Mind (artificial intelligence) ...

Google , which has 80,000 employees in the world, is today one of the best-known brands in the world and its name is used in everyday language with neologisms such as "googling" (doing a search).

For some years now, Google has also been manufacturing devices, such as Smart home speakers and Pixel smartphones.

However, it has suffered some disappointments, such as the Google+ social network or the first generation of Google Glass smart glasses.

Kings of advertising

Its business model is similar to that of Facebook: advertising aimed at users based on algorithms that take into account their personal data, their browsing history, and their location. According to eMarketer projections, both firms captured 57.5% of digital advertising in the United States this year.

In 2017, the turnover of Alphabet reached 111,000 million dollars, almost entirely from Google .

In the second quarter of 2018, it had revenues of 32,700 million dollars and a net profit of 3,200 million, affected by a large fine imposed by the European Union. Excluding the fine, the gain was 8,300 million dollars.

Fines, criticisms, and controversies

Google is in the sights of regulators, particularly in the European Union, mainly due to its dominant position in Internet search, advertising, and mobile operating systems. Android equips 85% of the world's smartphones.

He was subject to a European fine of 2,400 million euros in 2017 for abuse of dominant position in the online search, favoring his price comparison " Google Shopping".

This year, the EU again sanctioned it with a record fine of 4,340 million euros for abuse of Android's dominant position.

The group expressed its intention to appeal.

The traditional press accuses both Google and Facebook of being their gravediggers, capturing the largest share of advertising and readers.

Both are also opposed to a reform of copyright in Europe to grant more power to creators and press editors in front of Internet firms, which should provide better remuneration to content creators and allow newspapers and agencies press receive income for the reuse of its production on the web.

In the United States, despite being less criticized than Twitter and especially Facebook, Google has starred in several controversies, because he is accused of not having fought against the campaigns of political disinformation that swarm on the Internet.

Also, Google is in the sights of President Donald Trump, who accuses him of manipulating the results of searches to silence conservative voices, something that the firm denies.