Google The Great - Interesting read
Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.[16] In order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed, advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bidding and click-through rates, with bidding starting at five cents per click.[17][18] This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com (later Overture Services, now part of Yahoo!), one of the most successful companies in the 1990s. Google raised $1.67 million in three rounds of funding in 1998,[19] $25 million in 1999,[20][21] and $100 million in 2000.[22][23][24] An August 2005 secondary public offering raised an additional $4.18 billion,[25] making the total IPO proceeds to date $23.1 billion.[26][notes 1]
In January 1996, Andrei Broder published a paper on the AltaVista search engine providing details of how he had gathered the web crawler data which became the basis for ALIWEB.[27]
In June 1998, Brin and Page presented their paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" to the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia.[28] Since then, Page and Brin have been frequent keynote speakers at conferences and symposia. Over the years they have made several other important contributions to the field of information retrieval, including the establishment of the PageRank algorithm,[29] still used by Google today.
During their research project they had noted that webpages with high citation scores (links from other, well-cited webpages) tended to be ranked higher by conventional search engines. They realized that if they could develop a system that could crawl the web and create an index of all the pages it found, it would be possible to provide much better search results than existing techniques. This became the motivation behind their work.
In March 2001, at Stanford, Brin and Page presented "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", describing Google as "[...] a new kind of search engine".[30] This paper has been cited over 8,800 times.[31][32] Their initial idea was to sell Google as a commercial license to larger companies, but potential customers were not interested. To make Google available to everyone, they set up a charitable corporation, and by the end of 1998 Google was running on 2,000 desktops at Stanford.[33]
The following year, Sergey Brin named Larry Page as the new CEO of Google. Eric Schmidt, who had been hired as Chairman of the Board in 2001, took over as CEO in April 2011. In March 2015, Page once again became the CEO of Google. Marissa Mayer, a former executive at Google, replaced Schmidt as chairman.[34]
Over the years, Google has made several acquisitions to expand its reach into new markets. In February 2003, it acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a web logging service. Google acquired Picasa in July 2004, a web-based photo sharing service.[35]
In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.[36][37] The acquisition brought 400 million new users to Google and helped fuel further growth of the company. In April 2007, Google reached an advertising revenue sharing agreement with MySpace, which was owned by News Corporation at the time.[38]
In May 2010, Google acquired Agnilux, a secretive startup working on chips and hardware systems for servers.[39] That same month, the company also announced the acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising company,[40] for $750 million.
In August 2010, Google announced the acquisition of LabPixies, a Mumbai and Israel-based company that created interactive content such as games, widgets, and greeting cards.[41]
In October 2010, Google acquired Metaweb, a web of data that includes Freebase, a database of more than 12 million entities.[42][43] The acquisition was aimed at improving search results by better understanding the meanings and relationships between entities.
In April 2011, Google announced the acquisition of Admeld,[44] a display advertising platform that helps publishers increase revenue from their ad inventory. That same month, the company also acquired PushLife,[45] a mobile content management system.
In July 2011, Google announced the acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion,[46] its largest acquisition to date. The purchase was made in order to gain access to Motorola's portfolio of patents and mobile devices. In August 2011, Google announced the acquisition of Frommer's,[47] a travel guidebook series.
In January 2012, Google acquired Wildfire Interactive,[48] a social media marketing company. That same month, the company also announced the acquisition of SketchUp,[49] a 3D modeling program used by architects, engineers, and graphic designers.
In May 2012, Google announced the acquisition of Quickoffice,[50] a mobile productivity suite that allows users to create and edit Microsoft Office documents on their smartphones and tablet computers. In June 2012, Google announced the acquisition of Waze,[51] a social GPS navigation app.
In September 2013, Google announced the acquisition of Bump Technologies,[52] a company that develops mobile apps that allow users to share contact information and files by bumping their phones together. In November 2013, Google announced the acquisition of Makani Power,[53] a company that is developing energy kites, which are tethered wings that generate power from wind.
In January 2014, Google acquired Nest Labs,[54] a manufacturer of smart thermostats and smoke detectors. In May 2014, Google announced the acquisition of SlickLogin,[55] a company that is developing technology that allows users to log into websites and apps using their smartphones or other devices.
In January 2015, Google announced the acquisition of DeepMind,[56] a company that is developing artificial intelligence technology. In February 2015, Google announced the acquisition of Jaiku,[57] a social networking service.
In September 2015, Google announced the acquisition of Makani Power, a company that is developing energy kites, which are tethered wings that generate power from wind.[58]
In January 2016, Google announced the formation of Alphabet Inc., a holding company that would house Google and its other businesses.[59] Under the new structure, Page became the CEO of Alphabet and Sundar Pichai became the CEO of Google.[60]
In October 2016, Google completed the sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.[61][62]
In December 2016, Google acquired Owlchemy Labs,[63] a virtual reality company that is best known for its Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality games.
In January 2017, Google announced the acquisition of AIMatter,[64] a startup that is developing artificial intelligence technology. In February 2017, Google completed the sale of its satellite imaging business to Planet Labs.[65]
In September 2017, Google announced the acquisition of HTC's Pixel smartphone division for $1.1 billion.[66] The deal will see Google acquiring HTC's engineering team that worked on the Pixel smartphones.
As of October 2017, Google has made over 200 acquisitions,[67] with the most notable ones being the acquisitions of YouTube, Android, Motorola Mobility, and DeepMind.
In January 2018, Google announced the acquisition of Viewpoint Robotics,[68] a company that is developing technology for robots to navigate autonomously in unstructured environments. In February 2018, Google completed the acquisition of Xively,[69] a cloud-based Internet of Things platform from LogMeIn.
In May 2018, Google announced the acquisition of ITA Software,[70] a flight search and planning company, from American Airlines and other investors for $700 million. In June 2018, Google announced the acquisition of Velostrata,[71] a cloud migration startup.
In September 2018, Google announced the acquisition of Disqus,[72] a blog comment hosting service. In October 2018, Google completed the acquisition of Sigmoid Labs,[73] the company behind the AppSheet mobile app development platform.
In January 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Looker,[74] a data analytics startup, for $2.6 billion. In February 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Fitbit,[75] a fitness tracker company, for $2.1 billion.
In June 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Alooma,[76] a cloud data migration startup. In August 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Toontastic,[77] an educational cartoon creation startup.
In November 2019, Google completed the acquisition of Fitbit,[78] a fitness tracker company, for $2.1 billion. The deal was first announced in October 2018.[79]
In January 2020, Google announced the acquisition of Elastifile,[80] a cloud file storage startup. In February 2020, Google completed the acquisition of Looker,[81] a data analytics startup, for $2.6 billion. The deal was first announced in June 2019.[82]
In March 2020, Google completed the acquisition of Stackdriver,[83] a cloud monitoring and logging service provider, from Amazon Web Services for an undisclosed sum. In May 2020, Google announced the acquisition of North,[84] a smart glasses company.
As of June 2020, Google has made over 240 acquisitions,[85] with the most notable ones being the acquisitions of YouTube, Android, Motorola Mobility, DeepMind, Looker, and Fitbit.
Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai is an Indian American business executive. He is the CEO of both Google and its holding company Alphabet Inc.[3]
Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1972.[4][5] His mother Lakshmi was a stenographer and his father Regunatha Pichai was an electrical engineer at General Electric.[6][7][8] He grew up in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.[9][10] He earned his degree from IIT Kharagpur in metallurgical engineering.[11]
Pichai worked as a materials scientist at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company before joining Google in 2004.[12] He led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive.[13] He was then appointed the vice president of product development in 2013, overseeing the design and development of all consumer products, such as Search, Maps, YouTube, and Apps.[14][15]
In October 2015, Pichai gave a keynote about Google's plans for the future at the Internet Association's policy conference in Washington D.C.. In this presentation he stated that "Mobile as a computing platform is where personal computing was in 1980."[16][17]
Pichai was named the CEO of Google on 10 August 2015 after former CEO and co-founder Larry Page announced that he would be creating Alphabet Inc., a new holding company for Google with Pichai as its CEO.[18][19] As the CEO of Google, Pichai oversees all of its Internet products and services, such as Search, Maps, YouTube, Apps, and Android. He also oversees the technical infrastructure of the company.[20]
In December 2019, it was announced that Pichai had been awarded a $240 million stock grant which will vest over four years. The grant is performance-based, meaning that if Google meets certain financial targets during that time, Pichai will receive the full value of the grant. If not, he will only receive a portion of it. This grant is in addition to the $1.9 million salary and $380,769 bonus that he received in 2019.[21]
Pichai has been described as a "thought leader" on technology issues.[22][23] He is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry and has spoken about the need to increase the number of women and minorities in tech.[24][25]
In 2017, Pichai was ranked #9 on Forbes' list of the World's Most Powerful People.[26] In 2018, he was ranked #4 on Fortune's list of the World's Greatest Leaders.[27] And in 2019, he was once again ranked #9 on Forbes' list of the World's Most Powerful People.[28]
Pichai has been married to Anjali Pichai since 2004. They have two children together.[29][30]
The tech giant plans on adding more content to the site in order to make it a one-stop shop for all things Google. This includes everything from how-to videos and product demonstrations, to user generated reviews and even a Q&A section where users can ask questions and get answers from experts.
In addition to adding new content, Google also plans on redesigning the existing website to make it more user friendly and easier to navigate. The goal is to make it simpler for users to find the information they need, without having to search through multiple pages or clicks.
This brings the question of where is Bing, Ask.com, or maybe even DuckDuckGo? Google has the majority of the search engine market share. Experts state that "Google's dominance in search is unquestioned, but the company has been under pressure from antitrust regulators in Europe."[31] This could be due to the fact that "In March 2015, Google was hit with a record $57 million fine by the European Union for violating antitrust laws."[32]
The new content and redesign of their website is a way for Google to show that they are still the top dog when it comes to search engines. They want to keep users coming back to their site, and this is one way to do it.
6 notes
·
View notes
If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.
(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)
Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.
Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.
Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and
But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.
So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.
But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.
But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.
So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.
You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.
The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.
Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.
Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.
You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.
Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.
Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.
Never mind that last part.
And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.
Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."
To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.
It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.
So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:
Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.
32K notes
·
View notes
🎮 HEY I WANNA MAKE A GAME! 🎮
Yeah I getcha. I was once like you. Pure and naive. Great news. I AM STILL PURE AND NAIVE, GAME DEV IS FUN! But where to start?
To start, here are a couple of entry level softwares you can use! source: I just made a game called In Stars and Time and people are asking me how to start making vidy gaems. Now, without further ado:
SOFTWARES AND ENGINES FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE!!!
Ren'py (and also a link to it if you click here do it):
THE visual novel software. Comic artists, look no further
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It has great documentation! It has a bunch of plugins and UI stuff and assets for you to buy! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) You can also port your game to a BUNCH of consoles!
✨Cons: None really <3
Some games to look at: Doki Doki Literature Club, Bad End Theater, Butterfly Soup
Twine:
Great for text-based games! GREAT FOR WRITERS WHO DONT WANNA DRAW!!!!!!!!! (but you can draw if you want)
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's versatile! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch)
✨Cons: You can add pictures, but it's a pain.
Some games to look at: The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, Queers In love At The End of The World, Escape Velocity
Bitsy:
Little topdown games!
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's (somewhat) intuitive! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! You can make everything in it, from text to sprites to code! Those games sure are small!
✨Cons: Those games sure are small. This is to make THE simplest game. Barely any animation for your sprites, can barely fit a line of text in there. But honestly, the restrictions are refreshing!
Some games to look at: honestly I haven't played that many bitsy games because i am a fake gamer. The picture above is from Under A Star Called Sun though and that looks so pretty
RPGMaker:
To make RPGs! LIKE ME!!!!!
NOTE: I recommend getting the latest version if you can, but all have their pros and cons. You can get a better idea by looking at this post.
✨Pros: Literally everything you need to make an RPG. Has a tutorial inside the software itself that will teach you the basics. Pretty simple to understand, even if you have no coding experience! Also I made a post helping you out with RPGMaker right here!
✨Cons: Some stuff can be hard to figure out. Also, the latest version is expensive. Get it on sale!
Some games to look at: Yume Nikki, Hylics, In Stars and Time (hehe. I made it)
engine.lol:
collage worlds! it is relatively new so I don't know much about it, but it seems fascinating. picture is from Garden!
NOTE: There's a bunch of smaller engines to find out there. Just yesterday I found out there's an Idle Game Maker made by the Cookie Clicker creator. Isn't life wonderful?
✨more advice under the cut. this is Long ok✨
ENGINES I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND THEY SEEM HARD BUT ALSO GIVE IT A TRY I GUESS!!!! :
Unity and Unreal: I don't know anything about those! That looks hard to learn! But indie devs use them! It seems expensive! Follow your dreams though! Don't ask me how!
GameMaker: Wuh I just don't know anything about it either! I just know it's now free if your game is non-commercial (aka, you're not selling it), and Undertale was made on it! It seems good! You probably need some coding experience though!!!
Godot: Man I know even less about this one. Heard good things though!
BUNCHA RANDOM ADVICE!!!!
-Make something small first! Try making simple: a character is in a room, and exits the room. The character can look around, decide to take an item with them, can leave, and maybe the door is locked and you have to find the key. Figuring out how to code something like that, whether it is as a fully text-based game or as an RPGMaker map, should be a good start to figure out how your software of choice works!
-After that, if you have an idea, try first to make the simplest version of that idea. For my timeloop RPG, my simplest version was two rooms: first room you can walk in, second room with the King, where a cutscene automatically plays and the battle starts, you immediately die, and loop back to the first room, with the text from this point on reflecting this change. I think I also added a loop counter. This helped me figure out the most important thing: Can This Game Be Made? After that, the rest is just fun stuff.
So if you want to make a dating sim, try and figure out how to add choices, and how to have affection points go up and down depending on your choices! If you want to make a platformer, figure out how to make your character move and jump and how to create a simple level! If you just want to make a kinetic visual novel with no choices, figure out how to add text, and how to add portraits! You'll be surprised at how powerful you'll feel after having figured even those simple things out.
-If you have a programming problem or just get confused, never underestimate the power of asking Google! You most likely won't be the only person asking this question, and you will learn some useful tips! If you are powerful enough, you can even… Ask people??? On forums??? Not me though.
-Yeah I know you probably want to make Your Big Idea RIGHT NOW but please. Make a smaller prototype first. You need to get that experience. Trust me.
-If you are not a womanthing of many skills like me, you might realize you need help. Maybe you need an artist, or a programmer. So! Game jams on itch.io are a great way to get to work and meet other game devs that have different strengths! Or ask around! Maybe your artist friend secretly always wanted to draw for a game. Ask! Collaborate! Have fun!!!
I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye
26K notes
·
View notes