REINING IN THE HORSEMEN
Bought a new smartphone lately? One of the first things you probably did after popping in the mobile SIM card and booting it up was to open the web browser and tap in a search phrase.
If it was a new Apple or Samsung, the two bestselling smartphone brands in New Zealand, you would have automatically been sent to the Google search engine, which accounts for more than 90% of the internet searches undertaken globally every day.
For the best part of 20 years, we’ve been doing little more than googling when it comes to internet searches. Bing? Yahoo? DuckDuckGo? No other search engine comes close to Google’s ability to find exactly what you want as quickly as possible. I found that out myself when I was forced to live without Google for a few days last year during a visit to mainland China, where the search engine has been blocked by the Chinese Communist Party’s Great Firewall since 2010.
Google’s Chinese equivalent, Baidu, was woeful in comparison. I eventually found a virtual private network capable of tunnelling through the digital barrier, which is exactly how millions of Chinese access Google from within the country.
US politicians think these four companies are effectively an oligopoly that has a stranglehold on much of the tech sector.
TOP OF THE SEARCH RESULTS
Virtually from the outset, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, the Stanford University computer science students who designed the earliest version of the search engine in 1996, had a fundamentally better way of trawling the web for information.
But what has kept Google No 1 in search by a vast margin year after year ever since? Continuous innovation plays a big part – Google’s parent company, Alphabet, spent US$26 billion on research and development last year, a large chunk of which went into the search and advertising empire that generates the lion’s share of Alphabet’s revenue.
But the US Department
