Google will officially celebrate its 25th birthday later this month and Google CEO Sundar Pichai reflects on the first quarter century, of the company including the questions and technological advancements that led to our biggest breakthroughs and most helpful products.
Here’s are some quotes from his letter.
It all started with a search
Larry and Sergey first wrote down our mission 25 years ago: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. They had an ambitious vision for a new kind of search engine to help people make sense of the waves of information moving online. The product they built, Google Search, went on to help billions of people around the world get answers to their questions.
For a few years, I was one of those people experiencing Google like any other user of the web. I remember feeling blown away by Google’s ability to find the best answer for the most esoteric questions, from a tiny detail buried in a store’s customer service page to an obscure football rule.
The questions I’ve asked Google have evolved over time: “How do you fix a dripping faucet?” “Fastest route to Stanford Hospital?” “Ways to calm a crying baby?” And right around spring of 2003, perhaps: “How to ace a Google interview?” And over time, Google got much better at answering them.
A quarter century of questions
Search is still at the core of our mission, and it’s still our biggest moonshot with so much more to do.
Of course, Google today is more than a search box. We have 15 Google products that each serve more than half a billion people and businesses, and six that serve more than 2 billion users each.
Like most Google searches, all those products started with a question, too. With Gmail it was Could we offer 1 GB of storage to every person? In 2004, when Gmail launched, that volume of storage was over 100X what most other free webmail services were offering!
Then a few years later, we saw an opportunity to dramatically improve web browsers — and in turn the web — for people everywhere. So with Chrome we asked: Could we build a browser that made the web better, with simplicity, speed, and security at its core? Right before launch, I had my own question: Will people use this?
YouTube dared to ask: What if we gave everyone a way to share what they know with the world? And today, it’s become a powerful platform for learning and knowledge.
Looking ahead
As we look ahead, I’ve been reflecting on the commitment from our original founder’s letter in 2004: “to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible — to do things that matter.”
With AI, we have the opportunity to do things that matter on an even larger scale.
We’re just beginning to see what the next wave of technology is capable of and how quickly it can improve. One million people are already using generative AI in Google Workspace to write and create. Flood forecasting now covers places where 460+ million people live. A million researchers have used the AlphaFold database which covers 200 million predictions of protein structures, helping with advances to cut plastic pollution, tackle antibiotic resistance, fight malaria, and more. And we’ve demonstrated how AI can help the airline industry to decrease contrails from planes, an important tool for fighting climate change.
Read the full letter on Google’s blog here.
