Google

Google began as a Stanford research project with an outsized mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. Founded in 1998 by the graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it was built around an algorithm called PageRank that judged a web page's importance by how many other pages linked to it. As the internet exploded into an ungovernable sprawl, Google's search box became the tool that made the chaos usable, and its name became a verb.

The company's genius lay in turning attention into money. By pairing search results with small, targeted text advertisements, Google built one of the most profitable business models in history, one that let it give away powerful products for free. Gmail, Maps, the Android mobile operating system, the Chrome browser, and the video giant YouTube spread its reach across nearly every corner of digital life, all financed by advertising sold against the data it gathered on its users.

That reach made Google both indispensable and feared. It became the gateway through which much of humanity encountered information, giving it enormous influence over what people found and what they did not. Reorganized in 2015 under a parent company called Alphabet, it drew antitrust suits and mounting concern over privacy, its dominance of search and advertising echoing the monopoly fights of an earlier industrial age.

From a dorm-room project to a trillion-dollar company at the forefront of artificial intelligence, Google embodies the surveillance-advertising economy that came to define the internet. Its history is inseparable from the story of how the web grew from a novelty into the central nervous system of modern life — and from the questions about power, privacy, and information that came with it.