Digital Information Environment
54 Google
Hunter Reid
Introduction
Throughout the 2000s, there has been one search engine that revolutionized the internet. Google has become the world’s most popular search engine, and many people rely on the website to search for information throughout the internet. The popular search engine as of 2019, attracts 94.7 million monthly visits and is the 14th most visited website in the United States (Hardwick, 2019). The Google search engine serves almost like a library for the world allowing people to access a limitless amount of information in a fraction of a second. Topics that could’ve taken days to research 30 years ago can now be condescended down to minutes. Things like recipes, football scores, reviews, and articles are now just a click away. However, what makes Google so impactful and stand out from other search engines? The Google search engine has revolutionized the modern era because of its unique creation, its influence over the way society thinks and impacts the world’s economy.
Creation
Before Google was Google, it was originally a program called BackRub. The program was created by two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. BackRub was unique for its technology PageRank, it determined the relevance of the website by determining the number of pages and the importance of pages that linked back to the original website. In 1999, Google officially went out of beta, and in 2001, Google patented PageRank (Bellis, 2019). Since then Google has exploded into the behemoth of the company it is today. What makes Google so revolutionary and gives it its competitive edge over other search engines is its PageRank tech. This algorithm is what allows Google to find the most relevant webpages quickly, and in today’s society of information, it is crucial for people to find relevant and important data quickly. This why other search engines such as Bing fail in this aspect to living up to monolith that is Google. They are not able to compete in this regard to bring useful and relevant information quickly to the user. Google has also kept expanding its search engine with the creation of other search engines such as Google Scholar which allows the user to sort through academic articles. It is also important to note how Google indexes information and brings what a user is specifically looking for at the top of the list. Google states on their website, “in a fraction of a second, Google’s search algorithms sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results for what you’re looking for” (Google, 2019). People now no longer have to scour through other information to find the specific info. The most relevant information the user needs is all right there in a short concise manner, and this change has also dramatically changed how modern society functions.
This has caused a huge shift in demographics between millennials and baby boomers. While the