Google

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

BBC

Business

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2017

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The words 'clever' and 'death' crop up less often than 'Google' in conversation. That’s according to researchers at the University of Lancaster in the UK. It took just two decades for Google to reach this cultural ubiquity. Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google’s founders – were not, initially, interested in designing a better way to search. Their Stanford University project had a more academic motivation. Tim Harford tells the extraordinary story of a technology which might shape our access to knowledge for generations to come. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Google logo and search box on a screen. Credit: Yui Mok/PA Wire)

Transcript

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0:00.0	50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford
0:19.0	Dad, what happens when you die?
0:21.0	I don't know, son. Nobody knows for sure.
0:24.0	Well, why don't you ask Google?
0:28.0	Evidently, it's possible for children to grow up with the impression that Google knows everything.
0:34.0	Perhaps that's to be expected.
0:37.0	Dad, how far is the moon from the earth?
0:40.0	What's the biggest fish in the world? Did jetpacks really exist?
0:45.0	All efficiently answered with a tab of a touchscreen.
0:49.0	Only to visit the library to consult the encyclopedia Britannica, the Guinness Book of Records or...
0:55.0	Who knows how a pre-Google parent would have discovered the state of the art in jetpack technology?
1:00.0	It wouldn't have been straightforward.
1:03.0	Google may not be clever enough to know if there's life after death,
1:07.0	but the word Google does crop up in conversation, more often than either clever or death,
1:13.0	according to researchers at the UK's University of Lancaster.
1:17.0	It took just two decades for Google to reach this cultural ubiquity,
1:22.0	from its humble beginnings as a student project at Stanford University in California.
1:31.0	It's hard to remember just how bad search technology was before Google.
1:37.0	In 1998, for example, if you typed cars into Lycos, then a leading search engine,
1:43.0	you'd get a results page filled with porn websites.
1:47.0	Why?
1:48.0	Well, owners of porn websites inserted many mentions of popular search terms,
	...

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