How Google Became So Big in a Short Time

Google lets you search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google Fuels our exploration.

5 minute read

Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, collectively known as the Big 4, dominate many facets of our lives. They have taken over hundreds of companies over the decades, turning them into the world's most powerful tech giants. You will recognize many of the acquired companies, such as Zappos, IMDb, Twitch and Goodreads, which are now owned by Amazon. [Sources: 4]

According to a Techjury infographic, Google's use of search and innovative ideas has led it to acquire 216 companies in 22 countries. The majority of these acquisitions were small start-ups with valuable patents and talented engineers, many of whom led to products that are still in use today, such as Google Docs and iTunes. You may have heard of the big deals that Google has taken over Motorola Mobility and Apple Beats Electronics. [Sources: 1, 4]

Moreover, Google has mastered the art of transforming old ideas into new technologies, bypassing the factors that have limited its success. Google started out as an online search engine, but now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from email and online document creation software to mobile phones and tablet computers. [Sources: 1, 6]

Google's broad product portfolio and size make it one of the four most influential companies on the high-tech market, alongside Apple, IBM and Microsoft. The myriad products, especially Google's original search tools, remain at the core of its success. In 2016, Alphabet earned its revenue from Google advertising based on users' searches. [Sources: 6]

Chrome was not only a gradual improvement over the existing Firefox – incumbent Mozilla – but was 56 times faster at the time of its launch than Internet Explorer Two years after its September 2008 launch, Chrome had more than 120 million users by the end of 2010. [Sources: 8]

Investors, analysts, and members of the media touting the company's rapid growth began to wonder whether Google was just a one-trick pony that cleaned up Internet search and turned it into a nice advertising business. The Google team began to focus on a broader range of ground-breaking and lucrative projects: dominating the smartphone market, scanning millions of printed books, mapping the world's roads, and building a car-driving team. [Sources: 0]

Failed products such as the much-vaunted Google Dictionary and Google Wave did not stop the company from pursuing innovation and developing new and useful products. Many of the features of these failed products have been implemented in Google's other applications. For example, by creating the collaboration feature of Google Wave, multiple users could work with Google Drive on the same document and manage finds. [Sources: 3]

Although Google does not have an innovation department, its employees are encouraged to be creative and contribute their ideas for new products. As a result, employees are constantly throwing around ideas, many of which are welcomed by the company and integrated into Google's overall picture. [Sources: 3]

The problem is that these threats pose challenges to Google in areas it has not dominated in the past. It is not just that the standards that Google has set become irrelevant; it is that new standards are not only being created but that Google is losing relevance. [Sources: 7]

New demands from technology and user behaviour have given Amazon, Apple and Facebook a seat at the table. Google has the power to update its algorithms to experience changes in user behaviour. AI is the future, and Google has positioned Google Assistant as a legitimate challenger to Amazon's Alexa on the consumer throne. [Sources: 2, 7]

On Tuesday, September 4, Google turns 20, making it one of the most influential and longest-running companies in history. To some extent, Google's biggest product launches, legal sloppiness, and instrumental acquisitions have made it a Silicon Valley powerhouse that will endure for many decades to come. As Alphabet, the holding company behind Google's subsidiaries, ascends to join Apple and Amazon in a $1 trillion market, let's reflect for a moment on the company's past and what has placed it at the forefront of industries as diverse as map services, self-driving cars, and smartphone operating systems. [Sources: 2]

The last part of Google's dominance we will cover is Android, the mobile operating system used on almost every phone in the world that is not made by Apple. [Sources: 9]

Since Google bought it in 2006 for $16.5 billion - a sum that many thoughts was too high - YouTube and its sister companies under the Alphabet umbrella have become an integral part of our lives and a big part of Alphabet's success. The combined power of YouTube and Google has not only transformed the company into Alphabet, one of the largest companies in the world in terms of market value, revenue and profit. Here are a few quick-hit statistics to remind you how big their impact is on our lives. [Sources: 9]

If you have a smartphone, it is almost certain that Apple and Google built the operating system. You will be taken to a link that publishes Apple News, Google News or a social media site such as Facebook. The site loads, like so many others on the Internet, all connected to one of Amazon's ubiquitous data centres. [Sources: 4]

The acquisition ensured Google's ability to use information from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles in by-products such as the Google News search engine. After finding its way into everyday language, the word was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, which were to be used by Google search engines to obtain information from the Internet. The verb "Google" has since been entered in a number of languages as a slang verb and not as the default word to perform a web search - a possible indication that Google has become a generalized brand. [Sources: 5]

In June 2005, Google was valued at 52 billion dollars, making it one of the largest media companies in the world by market value. Google said it would use the $7 billion for acquisitions of complementary businesses, technology and other assets. [Sources: 5]

He, Brin, and Schmidt would remain the top executives in a new holding company called Alphabet, but more executives would earn CEO titles and autonomy to make important decisions themselves, rather than waiting for the triumvirate to come together and end the long debate. Google would be one of Alphabet's many subsidiaries nested within Google Ventures and others. [Sources: 0]