1995. The public internet was only 3years old. People wouldn’t really know what the internet was or how to use it or even if it was any use to them. On one particular day in 1995 history would have changed forever.
How Big Is Google ?
A 22 year old Larry page and 21 year old Sergey Brin meet for the first time at Stanford University. Larry and Sergey soon become good friends and begin collaborating a search engine called BACK RUB. In 1995 there were about 13 search engines to choose from and they were all terrible. They didn’t give back anything remotely close to what you ask for, but BACK RUB was different. It had a secret formula. It was called PageRank [PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1)) + … + PR(Tn)/C(TN))]. If you are looking at it now, this one formula was one of the reasons that BACK RUB performed so much better than the other search engines at the time. This was the secret formula who indirectly be worth billions in the future. On September 15th 1997 BACK RUB was changed into google.com and the rest as they say is history..
All of us just really see the surface of Google. We use their online services like Google search, Gmail, Youtube and Google+ every day. Many of us have a phone featuring Google software or may be even Google hardware. Google self driving cars and augmented reality glasses are cool but very few people ask themselves the question. How big is Google and what else are they up to? Let’s find out just how big is google. Google is much bigger than you think (Google Net Worth [Feb 2014] $350 billion!).
Acquisition day, 17th of August 2005. Cost $50 million. We all know what Android is and no doubt, the best part of Android is it’s open source nature. This allows the operating system to be on anything from phones to cars to fridges. Android is everywhere. Out of the 261.1 million smartphones sold in 2013, 211 million of them were running Android – that’s over 80%. Android has allowed access for countries such as China to really have a serious shot at the smartphone industry.
Acquisitions date 10th December 2006, at a cost of 1.65 billion droller. Looking at Youtube, purely just as a search engine. It’s bigger than Bing, Yahoo! and Ask all combined. In fact it is the largest search engine on the planet, second to only Google search itself.
So it’s obvious that people are searching for a lot of things. This only must mean there’s lot of content on the Youtube, but how much continues video-content actually gets uploaded per day? Maybe a week, one month’s continues video. Two months? A year? Nope, try a decade. That’s right, over a decade worth of video uploaded at a rate of 72 hours per min and that’s just in one day. It’s nothing. If you start adding it up again, it’s even stupider. One month, just in 30 days, 4 billion hours worth of video watched each month. It’s some 450,000 years worth of video watched just in one month.
Acquisition day 10th December 2013, cost – unknown. Ok so this is where things start to get a little bit crazy. Google bought Boston Dynamics, the company that created the robotic technology. This acquisition means that Google now own some of the most advanced robotic technology on the planet. It doesn’t end there though.
In late 2013, Google won in robotics company acquisition spree. Everyday they purchased a new company that operated in fields such as humanoid robots, robotic arms and computer vision. I guess we just have to wait for the announcement to see what they are really up to.
Acquisition date 26th January 2014. This was Google’s first AI (artificial intelligence) company acquisition. Deepmind can be described as a world-class groundbreaking technology on cutting edge machine lining. They use systems neuroscience to build powerful and general-purpose learning algorithms.
According to official statements, the Deepmind technology is going to be useful Google image search, for now anyway.
Project Loon aims to provide internet service for the four billion people that don’t yet have access. It aims to do this via balloons in the stratosphere. The balloons will float in the stratosphere about 20 miles or 32 kilometers above the earth surface. The balloons will create an aerial wireless network with 3G speeds. It is hoped that Project Loon will bring a low cost way to get the rest of the world online.
Bonus Content
Recently Google was a part of world first event with NASA. As it turns out, Google is also in the quantum computing game. Google and NASA are involved in one of the world’s first commercially available Quantum Computers. Now performance wise it’s not that great for a Quantum Computer. It is just a tiny bit faster than regular computer at the moment, but of course is the very first version of a brand new sort of computing. So it’s going to take some time to get there. But it is pretty cool that should be staring at is an actual Quantum Computer. It is hoped this computer could be used in the future to solve very complex optimization problems. One of which is Global Warming.
Have you ever heard of Google X? Google X is a semi-secret facility, run by Sergey Brin and Astro Teller. Google X claims to “Improve technologies by a factor of 10” according to Astro Teller. He goes on to say “… Think science-fiction sounding solutions”
So, over the next decade, we may see advanced intelligent robotics and the global expansion internet coverage. But in 10 years just how much will Google own? The services may already account for almost 40% of all internet traffic. It only can be and it has to be Google that advances the state of our world. There’s no other company out there that has the resources and infrastructure to do the research and develop such amazing technologies and produce products at a reasonable price for the world.
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