To Gabriel Weinberg, the chief executive of DuckDuckGo, which offers a privacy-focused search engine, what I have experienced was Google’s plan all along. The government’s case focused on Google’s search and how it appeared to create a monopoly through exclusive business contracts and agreements that locked out rivals. government against a technology company in decades. On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued it for anticompetitive practices, in the most significant antitrust action by the U.S. Google’s prevalence has brought the company to a critical point. In online maps, Google has photos of my house taken from outer space and camera-embedded cars.īy my unofficial estimate, I spend at least seven hours a day on Google-related products.
To learn how to repair a gutter, I recently watched home improvement videos on YouTube. A Google voice service rings my door buzzer.
My Nest home security camera is made by Google. For work, I use Google Finance (to look up stock quotes), Google Drive (to store files), Google Meet (to teleconference) and Google Hangouts (to communicate). On my computer and tablet, the various web browsers I use feature Google as the default search bar. On my Apple iPhone, I use Google’s apps for photo albums and maps, along with tools for calendar, email and documents. It has become the tech brand that dominates my life - and probably yours, too. The Silicon Valley company has leveraged the act of looking for something online into such a vast technology empire over the years that it has crept into my home, my work, my devices and much more. It isn’t just that I am spending more time in a Google search, either. (YouTube, of course, is owned by Google.) If I look for chocolate chips, for example, I see Google ads for chocolate chips pop up at the top of my screen, followed by recipes that Google has scraped from across the web, followed by Google Maps and Google Reviews of nearby bakeries, followed by YouTube videos for how to bake chocolate chip cookies. When I do a Google search in 2020, I spend far more time in the internet company’s universe. Two decades later, my experience with Google is considerably different. Once I found the link I needed, I was done with Google. Even better, Google seemed to show more up-to-date, relevant results.Īnd the entire experience took just a few seconds. Google’s minimalist design was a refreshing alternative to other search engines at the time - remember AltaVista, Yahoo! and Lycos? - which greeted us with a jumble of ads and links to news articles.
sample test,” scrolled through the results and clicked on a site. About 20 years ago, I typed into my web browser for the first time.