Consider This from NPR - Google Turns 25

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Google was founded 25 years ago by two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. The company went on to shape the internet and now, after a quarter century, finds itself at a turning point. With the rise of AI and social media platforms like TikTok, its continued dominance is not assured.NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, about Google's legacy and what the future holds for the company.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. See if you can catch the glaring omission in this story about search engines from NPR back in 1999. Think of names like Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, HotBot. Yeah, no Google. In 1999, it was just an upstart, worth just a brief mention later in that segment. Which is incredible because very soon after that,

Google would be running circles around those competitors. By 2002, just three years later, NPR, like the rest of the world, was already using it as a verb. There's even a term for it. You Googled her. Google has come a long way from the company that was founded 25 years ago this week by two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. My dorm room was the office, and Larry's dorm room was the data center. He had all these computers piled up in there. Yeah, I don't think his roommate found it entertaining after the first day or so,

because they're loud and they have lots of fans and stuff. That's Brin on WHYY's Fresh Air back in 2003. Even then, just five years into its existence, Google was a behemoth. Here's Larry Page on Fresh Air in that same 2003 interview. For me, I guess my dad was a computer science professor

and I grew up with computers sort of from age six. And I guess I had sort of an innate feeling that there was a lot you could do with these things and it would really change the world and be important. Consider this. For 25 years, Google has shaped the Internet. Now, artificial intelligence threatens the foundation the company was built on.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, September 5th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward.

It's Consider This from NPR. Back in 2003 on Fresh Air, Google co-founder Larry Page described his company's mission in very simple terms. We want to provide information to people. That's what we do. And so we try to err on that side whenever we can. I think this will be a very interesting issue for the world going forward. The reality turned out to be more complicated. Clickbait, targeted ads, and search engine optimization muddied the waters. Nilay Patel says this conflict, wanting to do good while also dominating the internet, has been with Google from the very beginning.

Patel is the editor-in-chief of The Verge. And as Google turns 25, he's been reflecting on the company's legacy and its future. So we invited him to talk about it. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Before Google had a parent company, Alphabet, before it owned YouTube, before Google It was a household phrase, what was this company's reason for existing? You know, Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with a better algorithm for delivering search results on the internet called PageRank, named after Larry Page. And really, they turned that into a business in a very classic Silicon Valley way.

They didn't know what business they were in. They just knew that their product was better than competing products. And at the very beginning of Google, they were both fairly opposed to advertising. And they knew that advertising would be a way to make money, but they thought it would corrupt the company inevitably. And here we are 25 years later, and Google is a dominant purveyor of advertising online. And it is, I think it's important for us to all take a minute and look at it and say, okay, our information architecture is dominated by people searching for things, and those search results are very much influenced by the needs of Google. Not only that, you write that Google set out to organize the world's information, but ultimately what ended up happening was that information organized itself for Google.

Can you give us an example of what you mean by that? Yeah, and I think this is largely true of all algorithmic media distribution platforms. And we just don't think about Google that way. If I told you that Instagram influencers tried to make things to please the Instagram recommendation algorithm, no one would bat an eye. Everyone knows this is true. YouTubers try to make videos that please the YouTube algorithm. There's a reason that every YouTube thumbnail looks crazy and has a shocking headline about what you won't believe. It's because that works in that algorithm, the way it's organized, the amount of words on a recipe website. All of that is there because people believe that the Google search algorithm will favor that stuff.

And so you just look at this world that we're in online and you say, boy, there's a true invisible hand here that dominates how people organize information. If you ask Google, they will deny this up and down. They will say that Google just reflects what people are searching for. And the truth is obviously somewhere in the middle, right? People are trying to rank higher in search.

They make things that the robot wants and the robot is just surfacing the results that people click on the most. And there's some cycle in there. But what is truly bizarre to me is no one will point directly at Google being the center of that cycle. So you argue that Google has not just reflected the internet back to us, but really shaped the internet as it exists today. And it may look very different tomorrow. When we look at the future of the company, you argue that AI-related challenges pose an existential threat to Google. Existential threat is a strong phrase.

Why? So that quote you played at the very beginning is the conflict that has been within Google from the very beginning. They are there to provide useful information. That's what Google has always thought of itself as. And initially, the way they provided it was by looking at the entire internet and sending you to pages on the internet that contained that information. Over time, Google has bought a lot of companies that now own and control that information, and they favor their own companies over competitors who might have better information on more useful services. They also just answer the questions directly now. There was a cottage industry of websites telling people what time the Super Bowl was. That was pretty ridiculous.

But they were all competing for Google search traffic for that query on the day of the Super Bowl. Now Google just tells you the answer to that question. That's probably fine. But you add in something like AI or Google's search generative experience, which needs to ingest a massive amount of data to then just provide the answers contained on the pages that it ingested. And no one gets any traffic from that. Nobody gets any value from that.

And you can see why a bunch of companies that have organized themselves around Google traffic are freaking out because they've just provided all of their work to Google for free and they're not really going to get anything else out of it. If an AI defined future is worse for Google, is it better for users who are just trying to find the best information without getting gamed and manipulated for clicks? I think that is one of the questions of the AI age. If no one wants to share their new information with Google, what will it train the AI on? If some set of big publishers say, look, our Google traffic is going down, we're going to stop letting Google crawl our webpages and stop feeding new information into the Google search machine.

Where's the AI going to get new, reliable information from? It can't scrape Instagram. It can't scrape TikTok. Those companies are closed off to Google. I've asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai about this, and his answer was that they have YouTube, that YouTube exists and people will still make YouTube videos. And I think that answer is fundamentally extremely revealing. Google knows that a new creator online is not going to start a webpage

the way that I started a webpage when I was a young person who wanted to make things on the internet. They're going to start a TikTok channel or a YouTube channel. So if the web slowly dies because Google and AI are sucking the value out of it without creating any incentives to create new things, I don't know where that leaves any of us, really. Okay, so big picture on this

anniversary, 25 years in, if you could describe Google's legacy in a sentence, what would that be? Secretly ruthless. Oh, that's rough. Wow. Secretly ruthless. That's even less than a sentence. Give me a little bit more. Why do you say secretly ruthless? Google has convinced everyone that it is this incredibly sincere and earnest company, but it's just a bunch of goofballs making cool things. That is true. But I think we just paid a little more attention to where Google's money comes from. And it is almost entirely advertising. I think we just paid a little more attention to where Google's money comes from, and it is almost entirely advertising. I think we would be able to see the company and its influence a little bit more clearly. But the truth is, it is an utterly ruthless advertising company that is very, very, very successful at delivering results to its clients.

But, Nila, you didn't mention how cute the Google doodles are. Yeah, like I said, they're very cute. I know a lot of Google people. I know a lot of Google people. I know a lot of Google executives. They're on my show, Decoder, all the time. I like talking to them. They wrestle very sincerely with very challenging tradeoffs. It is remarkable that we are all more cynical or more rigorous in our analysis of Facebook. To some extent, we're more cynical in our analysis of Apple.

To a huge extent, we are cynical in our analysis of TikTok. But no one applies that level of rigor to Google, which is actually the product that shapes the most information on the web. Nilay Patel is host of the Decoder podcast and editor-in-chief at The Verge, where all this year he'll be reflecting on the past and future of Google to mark the company's 25th anniversary. Thanks for marking it with us. Thank you for having me. And before we go, an update on what might be the next beat in Google's story. Next Tuesday, the Justice Department's antitrust trial against Google is

slated to begin. The DOJ and dozens of states are attacking business agreements that have made Google the default search engine on many phones, web browsers, and smart speakers. It's one of several cases accusing the company of exploiting monopoly status. Another reminder of, at least for now, Google's dominance. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.