Blog #8 - EOTO Peer Presentations

    It isn't often that you get taught new material from your fellow students. However, after going through the EOTO presentations, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed them. My favorite and the most impactful for me was the presentation done by my teammate Nic Francis. She did her presentation on the technological advancement and impact that Google has had on society. Something that she mentioned was that this was an incredibly hard thing to fit into a short presentation based solely on the fact that there is so much to talk about. Nevertheless, Nic was able to go through both the history and impact of Google effectively.

    Google was first created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Both of them were college students at Stanford University who wanted to create a new American tech company. Their main goal was to create a more efficient web browser because the current ones were not useful enough for them. The search engine at the time was called Web Crawler and it had about 4000 websites on it. For reference, Google now has 4.45 billion websites present on their search engine. Obviously, that's a pretty drastic difference!

In the last 22 years of its existence, Google has racked up some pretty impressive statistics:

• Search index over 100 million gigabytes large
• Dominates over 92% of search engine shares
• Google owns over 200 companies
• 90% of internet users use Google
  

    While these statistics are impressive, the even more impactful fact is that Google is only growing and getting bigger. It was recently bought by Alphabet Inc. of which owns hundreds of companies already. Google owns hundreds of successful companies such as Youtube and Android. Meaning that its reaches of impact go further than just helping you find out where the closest coffee shop to you is. Personally, a company this large is scary to me, but even with that thought, I would not have a lot of the things I do without Google.