Looking back at 20 years of google and what we can expect in the future

Just 20 years ago, on September 15, 1997, the domain name “Google” was registered. Originally, the name of the worlds largest search engine was to be “Googol”. Which is the word for ten raised to the power of a hundred (10¹⁰⁰). A typo and two decades later, Google is now one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world.

Google, which was originally just a search engine is now also the leader in online videos with YouTube, smartphones with Android, or even mapping with Google Maps. It also invests in dozens of companies specialised in various fields, from autonomous cars to artificial intelligence to medicine.

In 20 years, Google has not lost its spirit of innovation. The company has never stopped exploring new avenues, to buy promising start-ups in fields more varied than the others.

What are the future plans for google?

The Success of google was difficult to predict in 1997. So imagine what Google will look like in 20 years, it’s a little mission impossible. However the different experiments of the web giant has given us some indications.

Google could become the leader in the field of medicine with Verily, or we could see a huge development in Project Loon, which is a project that aims to use hot air balloons in space to deliver internet to more remote areas of the earth. Of course both of these ideas are far-fetched at the moment and after all, many of Google’s initiatives have failed for the past 20 years. Orkut, Google Reader, Glass, Wave, Buzz … so many projects that were supposed to be the future of the modern world.

But the failure of these projects has never stopped Google from continuing to try anything and everything. Why? This quotation from Larry Page, delivered at a TED conference in 2014, provides a better understanding of the logic behind these initiatives.

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.

However, Google have not forgotten the original mission of the company.

To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Still relevant? The co-founder is not entirely sure, but says the goal is still not fully achieved. Admittedly, we have access through the search engine to an incomparable amount of information to those available to a single person 20 years ago.

But for Larry Page, the problem is that “your computer does not know who you are, what you know, what you do.” And to explain a little more: “Google is trying to make devices work better by understanding context and learning more about the individual user”.

What Google lacks is Artificial intelligence that is able to understand the needs of each user, in order to provide a precise, adapted and specific response.

Images © Google