The Google logo reflected in a user's eye Scott Barbour / Getty Images
The alarm sounds.
A hand flies over the bedside table, groping for the source of the sound: probably a mobile phone and perhaps one of the more than 2.5 billion Android devices that exist in the world.
Alphabet's operating system (Google's parent company) accounts for 74.6% of the market and together with Apple's iOs - which includes the Google search engine by default - they account for 99%.
That gesture of turning off the alarm puts hundreds of millions of people at the gateway to Google services.
The corridor is long, full of branches and, of course, of information delivery.
"Google is so huge that even if you don't use Gmail or search, there is always something else in the ecosystem that will start to monitor you," says Andy Yen, CEO and founder of encrypted email service ProtonMail.
His company tries to provide an alternative service in a market in which the giant has enormous weight.
But not as much as in search and advertising, sectors in which the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, considers that Google is abusing its dominant position.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, is the largest antitrust action ever taken by the federal government since legal actions against Microsoft in 1998.
At breakfast time, why not take a look at the news?
60% of users who browse the Internet from their mobiles use Chrome and the figure rises to almost 70% if we talk about the browsers on our computers.
So there we are, in our pajamas, using a Google browser on a Google operating system.
But the day continues, and the doors to the giant continue to open to each task.
Will it be necessary to bring a coat?
We asked our smart speaker: “Ok Google.
What is the weather going to be today?
Four little dots light up, denoting that the voice assistant has listened to us and we get an answer: "Today in Madrid there will be showers."
If we have time to spare, maybe we can play a game of
Among Us
.
In 2009, Google Play offered some 16,000 applications in its gallery;
now it exceeds three million.
Video games, physical activity guides, bank account managers, mobility platforms,
streaming
services
... All ready to download in the great Android bazaar.
"Its business model is built on knowing as much as possible about its users and using that data for financial gain," reasons a spokesman for the privacy search engine DuckDuckGo.
On the way to work or to the errands of the day, we are given a new opportunity to continue falling through the tunnels of Google.
"How is the traffic on the route to the office? Where is the dry cleaner that they had recommended to me? Is there a place to have coffee nearby?"
The meticulous mapping of Google Maps, which is reaching down to the curbs of the sidewalks, hides all that and more.
And the cars that travel the world taking the images that complete these maps at street level are perhaps the best tangible example of the giant's ubiquity.
The first brick
Now we can get the information from Google out loud.
Twenty years ago, Internet users came to the nascent empire aboard mammoth desktop computers and we cast our doubts on the search form in the hope of finding an answer between the results pages.
“The algorithm that Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented is a very cool linear algebra application.
Another thing is how it is used ”, reasons Tomás Lázaro, professor of Mathematics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
"Google started very well, but it has become a monster."
In the beginning, the creators of the search engine prided themselves on taking us to other destinations.
"We want to get you off Google and into the right place as quickly as possible," said Larry Page in 2004. Now getting out of company domains is more difficult.
The searches land on the so-called
direct answers -
tabs, frequently asked questions, instant translations and short texts that make it difficult to move beyond the first
scroll
- and products linked to Google, such as YouTube videos.
Few people go beyond the first links.
"There is a somewhat macabre joke on the net that says that if you want to hide a corpse, the best place is the second page of Google results," says Lázaro.
According to the analysis of the specialized medium
The Markup
, 41% of that first page is made up of the company's own products.
Google was not the first search engine, but anyone would say that it is destined to become the last.
According to data recorded by Statista for July 2020, Mountain View's search engine eats 86% of the market share, compared to the almost irrelevant 6.4% and 2.64% held by Bing and Yahoo, respectively .
Along its way, pioneers such as Archie, AltaVista and the Spanish Ipiari have fallen.
"If the opposition had been another, we would still be alive," says Tomás Franco, current regional director of the JoVe scientific video platform and founder of this defunct search engine.
Ipiari was born in 2003 as Franco's final year project.
It was launched in 2011 and, in 2014, despite having obtained public funding, the platform disappeared due to lack of private support.
At that time, Franco was able to get used to the idea of the amount of information that someone who uses a search engine can compile: “It is the cornerstone.
You know everything about your users: their IP, when they enter, when they disconnect, what they are looking for, at what time ... You have so much data that even if you don't know the person physically, you know more about them than if you were their friend, ”he says.
In those wickers, but of a stratospheric order of magnitude greater, Google's advertising business has been woven, which in 2019 exceeded 134,000 million dollars (about 110,000 million euros, at the current exchange rate).
The information that we leave in the searches is now added to the information that the company obtains by monitoring our traffic through the websites that incorporate its technologies.
If you've been looking at shoes in an online store, prepare to be chased, in the form of an advertisement, to the ends of the Internet.
From home to office
Beyond the queries, Google has become the great archive of our lives.
On the shelves of your Drive we can store our personal or professional documents.
In Google Photo albums, vacation photos and family WhatsApp group memes are mixed - depending on the user's diligence in cleaning tasks.
Those who have their location history active can consult the detailed logbook that records their movements around the city where they live and the entire planet.
Google is also protected by the tools we use in our professional performance.
Our Gmail users form the core of our identity on their networks.
One step away from these we have our email inbox, the calendar, the now essential video calls that Hangouts and Meet facilitate, and all the third-party services that we want to link to that account.
Can the average user live without Google?
Yes. But right now such a decision will cost you a long list of compromises that could complicate your life in enough petty details to create a real hassle.
In addition, we would also be abandoning the passwords already saved in Chrome or the events scheduled in the calendar.
We would not have the mixed bag that is Drive, there would be no Android backbone our devices and we would renounce the ocean of video content that is YouTube.
ProtonMail, which was born as a mail service, already incorporates a calendar and a file storage space, but Andy Yen is aware that this is not enough.
“We do not offer a browser, or a search engine, or a mobile operating system.
We can't replace everything Google offers today, but the long-term goal is to do so, ”Yen reasons.
The entrepreneur, like others who seek to be an alternative to the giant, promises that its large catalog of services would be far from Google's, as it would not store user data and would not support the profitability of the company.
And he believes that the succession of Google, if it ever occurs, would be produced by collaboration between several companies.
“I think there is an ecosystem that is forming.
And this is better, because it avoids abuse ”.
At home, we may use Chromecast to project a YouTube video on the TV or put some music on the smart speaker to accompany the end of the day.
"Ok Google, wake me up tomorrow at 7 am."
The phone screen dimly illuminates the room to confirm that it has completed the last mission of the day: "Okay, the alarm is set tomorrow at 7 am."
And start over.
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