Google’s Place in Society & Culture
A brand has truly made it when it becomes a verb, when its very name is used to represent doing something in our lives. Kleenex is a brand of tissue, but has become a verb. Fibreglass became a verb for home insulation. How a brand name becomes a verb is an example of culture at work. It is a societal act, one that no amount of advertising can buy. Google became a verb.
In many ways, Google has become to modern society what cave paintings were to our ancestors. Information technologies, especially those that curate knowledge are a critical aspect of sociocultural systems and the evolution of humanity.
Perhaps in no small way, no matter how one might feel about where Google is today or what it has become, Google has become the verb of the start of the internet age. And make no mistake, we are still in the opening days of the internet. The digital era’s equivalent to when telephones started to enter into homes and offices for daily use.
With the rapid rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), such as Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s own Gemini, DALL-E 3 and Midjourney and now the GAI powered Perplexity and You search engines, many are decrying the death of Google. Perhaps, in a long time.
Often, when revolutionary or game-changing technologies enter society, we are quick to predict the the rapid demise of a dominant technology. While technologies or companies that dominate markets with an existing technology do often shutter, it is rarely fast. And the more used and embedded a technology is, the longer the period of its decline.
How we use search engine tools is about to undergo a fundamental shift. Platforms can be replaced. MySpace lost out to Facebook. Google Buzz flopped. So too did Google Circles (which was quite elegant at the time), Bebo, huge in the UK, lost out to Facebook as well. None of these platforms ever became verbs.
It’s no secret that Google has struggled to gain advantage with AI in terms of it’s platform strategy for search and both consumer and business offerings. Microsoft got the leg up on that aspect, but despite building ChatGPT into Bing quite cleverly, hasn’t much moved the needle for search engine dominance by Google. This is just one example of how deeply embedded in our zeitgeist Google has become.
Google has become more than just search with YouTube, AdSense, Maps and Workspace. Very rarely does a technology platform play a significant role across so many aspects of culture. Google impacts cultural exchange, economic models, politics and even health.
Concerns around privacy, data collection and some of Google’s (like all the others) business practices aside, Google has become part of the cultural warp and woof of our digital lives. Apple has done a brilliant job with Maps, rivalling, yet still not meaningfully replacing Google Maps. When a local business is building out it’s online presence, registering it with Google Maps is just a natural part of that process.
Google products, from maps and search to Drive are installed on billions of smartphones, watches and part of smart speakers, even passenger vehicles from self-driving ones to Android Play. Google often pays for this, such as being the default search engine on Apple devices. Even Apple, despite its size, treasure chest and capabilities, has still not launched a search engine.
Information technologies play a vital role in all cultures and have done since we figured out how to communicate through language (an information technology) and drawing things on cave walls. The easier they make communicating, the faster and more broadly across culture they become useful and accepted.
In economic terms, Google is often seen as being a form of monopoly (not really) or being dominant in a way that stifles competition and hurts consumers through algorithmic manipulation or data reselling. These are concerns, as they are with any digital platform today. All technologies are double-edged swords.
But Google has delivered Immense sociocultural value over just a couple of decades. The rapid growth of the internet and humanity’s thirst for knowledge and desire to tell stories are drivers of how we use information to survive as a species. The better and faster we an turn data into information, the easier it is to turn information into knowledge. Then we can tell stories and repeat the process.
Google brilliantly mastered this through the use of algorithms and simple design. This understanding and approach changed society at a fundamental level. Playing a vital role in making the internet accessible and knowledge too.
Google search has been about finding websites. That’s been its most basic and key role. Using GAI in search is very different. The role of GAI in search is about getting quick summaries so we can get some knowledge quickly. From there, with using GAI in search, we are not looking for websites, we are looking for insights upon which to build. Whether that be forming hypotheses, confirming an idea or hunch or figuring out where to go deeper. These are two very different actions.
To not just survive, but thrive, Google faces a daunting challenge. To make simple with GAI search what it did for website search. It is, in no small way, an existential crisis for Google. And they know it. Perhaps the biggest challenge for Google will be overcoming the challenges of corporate culture. As organisations become larger, cultures change with the arrival and growth of bureaucracy. This, more than technology, is Google’s biggest roadblock.
Google is unlikely to ever get back to it’s heyday of being small and scrappy and making statements like “do no evil.” That is the bane of smaller startups and companies. Which is where the most interesting innovations usually come from.
So while there are threats close on the heels of Google, expecting them to just collapse into obscurity and overnight is unlikely. Changing how society as a whole behaves with significant technologies takes far longer than we think. The ultimate decider of Google, or any other technology platforms fate will be, as it always has been, culture.
What Google’s real battle for, aside from economics, is staying culturally relevant. If they can do that, and there’s every chance that they can, then they may have a much longer future.
Most tech giants, as they putter along in our societies, go through different phases in their relationships with society and culture. For decades, Apple was the underdog and Microsoft was seen as brutish, monopolistic and a brand to be mocked. Now, Microsoft is seen as good brand that rose from near death to enjoy a warmer place in the cultural sun and Apple’s reputation is shifting. Facebook has long had a sort of love-hate relationship with culture. Twitter, now X, has gone from interesting to questioning by society. But that’s all for another article.
Don’t count Google out yet. There’s still a lot of interesting things that could happen. And so far, culture at scale, seems to like Google. Distrust of AI is high right now across many parts of our sociocultural systems, consumers are unsure of it and wary for now.
