San Francisco – Google is the biggest and best-known internet company in the world, a colossus whose revenue this year is expected to top $65 billion (R780bn). It makes headlines seemingly every week. But despite being so familiar, Google is often misunderstood. Here are four common myths.
1. GOOGLE IS A SEARCH COMPANY
Search is Google’s primary product. Its search engine is so widely used that “Google” has become a dictionary-approved verb, and the company makes virtually all its money by selling ads connected to search.
But Google’s ventures into self-driving cars and balloons that deliver internet connectivity from the stratosphere show that it’s not just a search company. Its long-term plan is to become an artificial intelligence company.
Google has built a research group around AI and machine learning, and even hired renowned AI guru Ray Kurzweil, who believes that by 2045, humans will merge with computers in what’s known as “the Singularity”.
Google’s recent acquisitions speak to its intentions: British company DeepMind, one of the most advanced AI development shops in the world, plus eight of the world’s best robotics companies. Nobody knows what Google will do with all these robots and AI software, but its ambitions certainly go well beyond self-driving cars.
This work takes place inside Google X, the company’s top-secret research lab. A few hundred people work there, a tiny but potent slice of Google’s workforce of 53 600.
Google isn’t alone in the quest to develop AI (Facebook also has an AI research team), but it’s one of the few organisations with the brainpower and financial resources to make true artificial intelligence a reality. Plus, AI is in its blood: Google co-founder and chief executive Larry Page is the son of renowned AI pioneer Carl Page.
2. GLASS WAS A FAILURE
Headlines proclaimed that Google Glass “flopped” after the company announced it would stop selling its goofy $1 500 eyewear. As a consumer product, Glass was declared clunky, too expensive and not useful.
But Google never intended for Glass to be widely worn. That’s clear from the awkward design. In the summer of 2013, I was among a group of “influencers” invited to the Google campus to see some future products. Many of the influencers showed up proudly sporting their Google Glass eyewear – and looking like idiots. Not one of the Google executives wore Glass.
Google viewed Glass as an experiment, a way to explore wearable computing and learn lessons it can apply to other, presumably less-hideous-looking products. Wearable devices will eventually be a huge market, encompassing products from virtual-reality goggles to fitness bands to smartwatches such as the new Apple watch. Google announced this past week that it will develop a smartwatch in partnership with Intel and Tag Heuer, and wearables were all the rage at this year’s South by Southwest tech conference. Though Glass didn’t catch on, it created tremendous buzz and established Google as a pioneer in the market.
3. GOOGLE HAS AN UNASSAILABLE MONOPOLY ON SEARCH
Google dominates the search market so thoroughly that in 2009, when Microsoft introduced its Bing search engine, even people who admired the product reckoned that it didn’t stand a chance.
“In 2004, if this was side-by-side with Google, it would be very competitive. In 2009, it’s not a level playing field,” according to Alex Hoye, head of a search engine marketing firm.
He was right. Six years later, Bing has a 12 percent market share in search and Google has 75 percent – even more than its share in 2009. Other rivals keep trying to chip away – Yahoo recently picked up a couple of market-share points and now holds 10.6 percent – but it appears that in the traditional search engine market, the game is over, and Google has won.
But the real threat to Google’s search business doesn’t come from Microsoft or Yahoo. It comes from Amazon and Facebook, and from the changing habits of online shoppers. Amazon and Facebook aren’t in the search business, strictly speaking, but increasingly people turn to these sites to learn about products. In other words, the challenge to Google is not that competitors will take over the traditional search engine market, but that traditional search engines will become less relevant as search takes place on other sites.
4. GOOGLE IS BIG BROTHER
If you’re using Google’s online services, including search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Drive, Google+, Android, Wallet and Picasa, Google knows a lot about you: your location, browsing history, the videos you watch, your age, gender and interests. That has earned the company plenty of Big Brother comparisons.
Google’s rivals love to play up the company’s spying capabilities. Microsoft spent millions on its “Scroogled” ad campaign, which aimed to scare people away from a big, nefarious company that was snooping on its users.
There is a Big Brother online, but it’s not Google: It’s America’s NSA. The National Security Agency is the one peering into every major tech company’s systems and hoovering up personal information.
Google has responded aggressively to news about the NSA’s activities revealed in the Edward Snowden leaks, vowing to keep developing techniques to prevent the agency from spying on people who use its services.
Co-founder Sergey Brin said Google has 1 000 engineers working on security and has started encrypting data flowing across its servers. The company described its defences as “techniques that no one believes the NSA can break in our lifetime”.
The Washington Post