Here Is How Google Works

Google is the world’s most popular search engine. A public company, currently with a $350 billion market cap, Google has a lot of irons in the fire, and it can be hard to keep track of them all. I thought I’d use this article to explain exactly how Google works.

Google gained prominence as a search engine, and that still accounts for a lot of its revenue. Whenever you type a search into Google, it looks at its vast database, and brings you the most relevant results. Often, it will also display advertisements to you. Unlike previous generations of web ads, these ones are highly targeted, and Google is able to charge a premium for them.

The ads are targeted so effectively because Google has been collecting all your personal data for 15 years, and they have also been selling you very cheap phones with GPS chips in them. You carry those phones around pretty much 99% of the time, so they have a great idea of where you’ve been, and where you are. Google has also recently introduced Glass, a new wearable product, that lets them actually see what you see.

Google is also famous for its Google Maps service. What started as just regular street maps has expanded into a wide array of products and features that contain info about almost every place on the planet. From ancient Mayan ruins to Antarctica, Google has seen everything, and they have photos and maps. There is almost nowhere on earth safe from Google’s eyes.

Google doesn’t stop there. Google is like, hey, we figured out how to track millions of humans and see what they see, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could get their DNA? So they invest millions of dollars into 23andme, a company that gets people to literally mail their DNA to them. One of the 23andme co-founders was married for years to Sergey Brin, CEO of Google, just in case Google has trouble getting at any of that DNA at any point. Google needs the DNA. Google has plans.

So then Google is like okay, cool, so we’ve pretty much got this whole Humanity thing sorted. We’ve got a ton of DNA, we know where millions of people are at all times, and what they’re thinking and looking at. Know what we should do? We should funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into a murky new company that focuses on “life extension”, because we’re not quite in peak supervillain mode. We’ll call that company Calico, a word that is related to cats, which our web search data tells us people love,and find non-threatening. Very few humans are threatened by cats. Calico is not a human cloning facility.

Then someone at Google says “Hey speaking of the supervillain stuff, what was that documentary about the guy who wanted to transfer his brain to a computer, and also make a computer version of his dad, so they could live forever? Remember how when you watched it, you were kind of like aww, he’s a bit nutty, but at least he’s harmless? Oh yeah Ray Kurzweil! Let’s make him Director of Engineering, and just let him go crazy with all this stuff! Let’s put him in charge of the massive engineering resources we have, HE is the person who should be in control of this stuff, for sure. Yeah get the guy who literally wants to be turned into a computer on the phone, he’s our guy.”

Then someone is like “Hey, just in case something goes wrong with humanity, like I don’t know, maybe a whole bunch of class C non-compliant humans somehow accidentally get electrocuted by some faulty Google Glass units, I mean just in case.. Could cars that drive themselves, with no need for humans, could those somehow fit into this vague, kind of menacing picture?”

Someone else goes “You know what, why not! It sure can’t hurt to have a vast armada of self driving cars, it’s not like we’re ever going to weaponize them or anything lolol!”

Then Eric Schmidt says “Okay cool, so I think we’ve got our plans pretty solid for now. Maybe just to be safe, we should slowly make the humans crazy, ummm what’s a slow but sure way to just drive them insane?”

Sergey Brin says “How about we just constantly fuck with the Gmail compose window and make it smaller and less usable every 3 weeks? For a year or two this will be funny. Until the suicides begin.”

They all laugh. Larry Page says “My last name means Web Page. Nobody has noticed this.” They all continue to laugh.