What Have We Learned From Google?

20 years after its launch, Google is responsible for an entirely different way of thinking

Technology changes fast, but few products, services or companies have swept into an existing market and refashioned them in their own image as quickly and completely as Google.

In 1998, Google wandered into a busy room full of Internet know-it-all search engines. A few of them — like Northern Lights, Alta Vista, and Yahoo — were recognized leaders. Each one had its own approach to indexing the rapidly expanding web with browse trees and spiders. And each one had millions of devoted users. Without these engines, most of us had no idea how to find anything on the World Wide Web (as we often called it back then).

Without Google, I don’t think we ever would’ve truly understood the enormous power and potential of data.

Within a year, Google was recognized as one of the internet’s best websites. It was lauded for its uncanny ability to find relevant results. In 1999, two years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company, PC Magazine deemed it “destined to succeed.”

By year five, Google was a verb, as I noted when I wrote “I Search, Therefore I Google.” All those…