Future Google Search Will Answer the Questions Even Before Being Asked

Typing into a search bar has been the most common way to interact with Google. They are now trying to be more active in leading its customers on the Internet. The company has made an announcement about releasing many new features of Google Search at the celebration event of its 20th anniversary on September 24. A news feed, similar to Facebook, with articles and videos Google thinks may make a user interested will now appear on the homepage of Google which is just under the search bar on mobile versions.

Karen Corby, which is a product manager of Google search, believes that "It helps you come across the things you haven't even started looking for,". Google also revealed a feature that allows people to save their searches in collections and use them later. The new Google search would also give more information to its users directly in the results of their searches which help users save their times in finding what they are looking for.

Google is aiming to increase its presence on the Internet and make people change from going to independent websites to spend their time on Google directly. As the presence of Google grows more, its competitors, activists, and politicians are calling for more monitoring over the growing power of Google over data.

Bloomberg News believes that Donald Trump - US President was thinking about signing an executive order to empower federal antitrust agencies and show them how to look into giant Internet corporations like Facebook and Google.

It can not be considered as a new development if we just count the simple search bar on. However, the company has expanded to other industries like traveling. They built its own tool for searching hotel and flight that have successfully pushed them into a large market that has been dominated by Expedia Group and Booking Holdings. Google’s announcements on September 24 may indicate that this trend is not over in the recent future.

The figure of research source for US vacation package buyers

Collections - a new feature of Google has a similar function to Pinterest. Google expended Discover to increase its role in suggesting information and content to its users, changing the situation where it is just a portal that users use to find the things they need by themselves.

“Providing greater access to information is fundamental to what we do, and there are always more ways we can help people access the information they need." as said by Ben Gomes - Google’s Vice President of search.

It has been a long way since Google was just a search engine created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin that made a ranking of websites from the data of how many times other sites linked to them in 1998 in just a garage located in Menlo Park, California.

Two founders of Google: Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page‎ (right)

On the path of Google’s success, it has managed to overcome many rivals like Ask, Excite and even Yahoo and become one of the most-profitable empires in the world. One of the key factors for Google’s success was its early awareness of the search service’s importance as it can become a global digital funnel where people type what they want and desire. Google started making money by showing relevant advertising with search results and that allows companies to reach out to more customers at the appropriate time and also accurately evaluate their campaigns’ performance more accurately.

Founders of Google - Page and Brin disagreed with the idea of selling ads on their search engine as they believed that doing so might dilute the services they were offering to customers with skewed results. However, Google’s current managers may have a different idea with two founders of Google as the ads are now taking up top results of the searches and even a large portion of the screen when users use Google search in their mobile devices. To keep the revenue and profit growth, it has been trying to put more ad formats in these recent years. In just last year, Google made a profit of approximately $25 billion and most of the profit came from the search business.

Google has utilized the profit from its search business to open more services on the Internet which offer free of use for people such as Gmail, Google Maps and Android - Operating system for mobile. After acquiring Youtube in 2006 with a fee of $1.65 billion, Google has gained a substantial amount of customers to sell ads and that help them to expand their range of business.

The profit also allows the two founders to support their creativity and curiosity as they created a lot of other riskier and long-term projects such as contact lenses that can measure blood sugar level or high-altitude internet balloons. Many of them failed but a few such as Waymo - self-driving car project has turned out to be promising businesses.

If that was the exuberant youth of Google, the corporate adulthood of Google should happen when it reconstructed by creating Alphabet as a subsidiary of itself to hold the core businesses of Google.

Three years after the reconstruction, there were more responsibilities on Google’s shoulder along with judgment and disappointment. Europe governments are trying to challenge the business model of Google as they fined Google for violating their antitrust laws. US’s politicians have used Google as their punching bag. Many conspiracies suggest that Youtube and news service of Google has been struggling to filter out incorrect and misleading information.

But despite all problems, Google search business has still steadily increased in profit. In this year, shares of Alphabet have increased by 12 percent and that bring Google into the top 4 of the most valuable public company, only behind two tech giants Amazon and Apple.