Googling something was all we once did with Google. Now, even if you own an iPhone, as this writer does, chances are you spend as many as seven hours using Google's products each day, ranging from cameras to email
Googling something was all we once did with Google. Now we spend hours a day using its maps, videos, security cameras, email, smartphones and more.
Image: Glenn Harvey/The New York Times
About 20 years ago, I typed Google.com into my web browser for the first time. It loaded a search bar and buttons. I punched in “DMV sample test,” scrolled through the results and clicked on a site.
Wow, I thought to myself. Google’s minimalist design was a refreshing alternative to other search engines at the time — remember AltaVista, Yahoo! and Lycos? — which greeted us with a jumble of ads and links to news articles. Even better, Google seemed to show more up-to-date, relevant results.
And the entire experience took just a few seconds. Once I found the link I needed, I was done with Google.
Two decades later, my experience with Google is considerably different. When I do a Google search in 2020, I spend far more time in the internet company’s universe. If I look for chocolate chips, for example, I see Google ads for chocolate chips pop up at the top of my screen, followed by recipes that Google has scraped from across the web, followed by Google Maps and Google Reviews of nearby bakeries, followed by YouTube videos for how to bake chocolate chip cookies. (YouTube, of course, is owned by Google.)
It isn’t just that I am spending more time in a Google search, either. The Silicon Valley company has leveraged the act of looking for something online into such a vast technology empire that it has crept into my home, my work, my devices and much more. It has become the tech brand that dominates my life — and probably yours, too.
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