How Did Google Get so Rich?

How the company whose motto was once “don’t be evil” monopolized the most essential operations of the internet.

By Brock Hrehor, More Perfect Union

Since its inception in 1998, Google has grown from a scrappy search engine startup to a tech behemoth with a nearly $2.5 trillion market cap and a hold over a staggering 91 percent of digital ad markets, according to the DOJ.

As the company’s grip over the ad market has grown to near-unilateral control, many users have begun to notice a considerable decline in quality. Some researchers suggest, in line with user concerns, that the search engine is drowning out useful information in favor of search-engine-optimization, or SEO, tactics that involve trapping users on the search engine in order to drive up ad revenue.

But how did Google get to this point in the first place, and what could the integration of artificial intelligence mean for the company that already controls the most essential architecture of the internet?

Back in 2001, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page brought on Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of software company Novell, to help expand the company. Schmidt (who, in the wake of Microsoft’s monopoly investigation, accosted his employees for not prioritizing market domination to the point of being the subjects of an antitrust suit themselves) went on to lead years of acquisitions, especially in ad tech, that helped the company gain control over the ad infrastructure that has helped transform it into the industry titan it’s become today.

Google’s growth didn’t come without regulatory pushback, and its expansion has previously been the subject of antitrust considerations: Once in 2008, in which the company’s planned advertising partnership with Yahoo would have prompted an FTC lawsuit, and another in 2012, when the FTC made a case against Google, claiming that the company’s then 70 percent search market share was harming competitors.

By this point, Google had become so essential to the internet that most webpages were forced to optimize their content in line with Google’s search result rankings. While there’s no official guide as to how search results are ranked, it is known that the engine rewards pages based on how much time users spend on them—as this means more time users spend looking at ads and ultimately higher profits for Google.

“They own the supply, as in, how you buy the ads, how you sell the ads, how you get the ads places, and indeed, the ads that appear on search itself,” technology writer and PR specialist Ed Zitron told More Perfect Union.

This practice has severely impacted user experience, even to the point that some of Google’s engineers have spoken out against it, expressing concern that the company has been too focused on growth at the expense of the search engine’s quality.

“They don't care about whether you're finding things. Indeed, if you find something, you might leave Google. And that's not what Google's in the business of,” said Zitron.

While Google’s market dominance could have been curbed in two separate antitrust cases, a recent ruling in one of the cases amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. DOJ officials in both suits alleged that the company illegally monopolized both digital advertising markets and online search markets, but the ruling in the search market case essentially allows Google to continue uninhibited.

Judge Amit Mehta, who oversaw the breakup of Google’s search engine case, released a series of remedies that some critics characterized as “cowardly” and “contradictory.” The remedy bars Google from entering or maintaining exclusive distribution agreements and forces the company to share portions of its search index and user interaction data with competitors, but substantive remedies designed to break up the illegal monopoly, like divestiture of chrome, were dismissed as “overreach.” Upon the news of the lax remedies, Google stock jumped up 8 percent.

Despite Judge Mehta ruling that Google is an illegally-formed monopoly, the remedies allow Google to subvert any real accountability for and largely leaves its market dominance intact. It doesn’t bode well for the advertising case’s resolutions.

For a deeper dive into the history of Google’s dominance, what integrating AI might look like for the company and its workers, and what consumers might be able to do to push back against the search engine’s longstanding and ongoing drop in quality, see the video below.

Reporting by Sean Morrow. See below for a full transcript of the video.

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SEAN MORROW, More Perfect Union: I research things online for a living, so that means I spend a lot of time on…

SEAN, on desktop: Google. For me, like 80% of Americans, Google is my gateway to the entire internet. And I couldn’t help but notice: Google has gotten a lot worse recently. I remember it being a lot better, and lots of other people do too. But… there really is no major alternative, right? Google’s become a bit…. Inescapable. They influenced the very nature of the internet itself, and by extension the way humanity shares information. This very video couldn’t have been made without them. And that, of course, has made a handful of people very, very rich. And now Google is integrating something new:

*NEWS CLIPS TALKING ABOUT AI*

SEAN: What does the integration of artificial intelligence into most people’s gateway to the internet mean for humanity? I went through old research papers, corporate governance documents, and spoke with some of the people doing the work to power Google’s AI behind the scenes. So how’d we get to the point where one product launch could alter how we access knowledge? Let’s look into it the only way anyone knows how anymore: Here are ten Google searches to tell the story of how Google stole the internet:

SEAN: Let’s start simple. “What is Google?” “Google is a multinational technology company whose “core mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, according to Google. So let’s find out what Google really is with Ed Zitron. He’s a writer, podcaster, and PR expert who has been covering the tech industry for years.

SEAN: So, what is Google?

ED ZITRON, Writer: So everyone thinks that Google is just Google search, and in many ways, they're right. Everything centers around that… What Google has become is a kind of an amalgamation of what is now about 10 to 20. Different companies.

SEAN: We’ll get back to Ed–he’s got some bigger truths to drop–but first we’ll rewind to the beginning.

SEAN: 2: Why did we need Google? In the 90s, home and personal use of the internet took off, and people began creating webpages–documents with text and images, linked together with hypertext, forming websites. In mid 1994, there were only 2700 websites. By the end of that year there were 10,000. A few months later, 650,000. People needed a way to dig through all this stuff. The first search engines started popping up, like Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. But these search engines had a problem. The results they returned were just based on if the exact phrase you searched appeared on the page, and how many times. So if you searched ‘chicken parmesan recipe,’ you’d get whatever page mentioned ‘chicken parmesan recipe’ the most. Some of these actually had a human staff curating results into a directory, which became totally impossible as the internet grew.

VIDEO CLIP: Now that I’ve gone on the internet, I’d rather be on my computer than doing just about anything.

SEAN: In 1998, two Stanford researchers, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, published an academic paper: “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine.” The paper suggests that the ideal way to find information online is not by how many times the search phrase appears on the page, but by the amount of other pages that link to it. So a search for “chicken parmesan recipe” would return the result that the most other sites said “check out this chicken parmesan recipe.”

ED: This paper shows that, yeah, this was not our hodgepodge thing. These were scientists. These were guys that actually, genuinely wanted to do something cool.

SEAN: Just six months after launch, a glowing newspaper article wrote Google “usually finds exactly what we're looking for and for some mysterious reason it tends to be within the first five hits”

ED: There used to be this crazy idea where you type in a thing, and it would come up with a result, and the result would be good. And indeed, you'd find cool things on Google. You'd find obscure blogs that Google had risen. The idea of Google was that the web is too big for you to search alone, that things are disconnected, decentralized. Google centralized them, and in return, Google made an absolute arse ton of money.

SEAN: So how’d they make that arse ton of money?

SEAN: What does arse—How does Google make their money?”

ED: This company really is just a giant ad monopoly pretending to be a thing that you type stuff into that gives you answers, and used to give you better answers than it does today. But in reality, it is a large ad monopoly.

SEAN: That seems a bit weird considering a section of that original paper Brin and Page wrote “Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives” It’s a section outlining the problem with a search engine getting its revenue from ads

SEAN, reading to Ed: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

ED: Damn. In retrospect, wouldn't that suck if someone did that?

SEAN: If you can’t tell from Ed’s classic British sarcasm, Ed is calling out that that’s exactly what Google does today, it’s what they built a monopoly on. The first ever ad was for “Lively Lobsters” a company that sent you live lobsters in the mail. And investors saw the promise immediately… of the ads, not the lobsters.

SERGEY BRIN: We met this guy, you know, he took a quick look at our search engine, we started talking about, he said, ‘oh, well I’d be interested in investing.’ So he went back to his car, came back with a checkbook, and he wrote us a check for $100,000.

SEAN: But with those new investors also came new demands.

SEAN: Google investors thought the young brand needed a money guy, so…

*BRIN AND PAGE, on Charlie Rose*

ROSE: You've just hired Eric Schmidt. So what's the idea behind that? You guys couldn't run it yourself?

LARRY PAGE: Parental supervision,

SEAN: He was brought on to build “corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth.” I wonder if Ed has any thoughts on rapid growth.

ED: The only thing that grows forever is cancer. And I mean, Google kind of feels cancerous right now, but nothing can grow forever, nothing unless you make it worse like this.

SEAN: That’s Ed reflecting back from 2025, but even back in 2001 when Schmidt entered, Google was huge. “Google” as a verb for… googling something, was already in dictionaries and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

CLIP FROM BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Have you googled her yet? Willow, she’s seventeen.

SEAN: Eric Schmidt had a history of fawning over rapid growth even to the point of monopoly, reportedly saying at a previous company: “Why isn't it the goal of each and every one of you to become so successful that someone sues us for being too dominant?" At Google, Scmidt led years of acquisitions of companies, mostly in ad tech, building an advertising juggernaut out of the search engine. So let’s say you do a Google search, again, for chicken parmesan recipe. You see several ads on the page, but you click on what looks like a legitimate recipe. There are ads all over that page. And guess who sells those ads.

ED: They own the supply, as in, how you buy the ads, how you sell the ads, how you get the ads places, and indeed, the ads that appear on search itself.

NEWS ANNOUNCER, 2004: Google, the company that makes the world’s most popular internet search engine, just went on sale to great fanfare today.

SEAN: In 2004, Google IPOd, their introduction to the public stock market. Google’s IPO documents introduce what became their well-known slogan: Don’t be evil. Brin and Page write, in their ‘founders letter,’ “Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. Then we saw the first sign of Google being too big, as Eric Schmidt finally achieved his dream:

SEAN: In 2008 a potential advertising partnership with Yahoo brought about Schmidt’s coveted antitrust investigation: the FTC told the companies they’d file an antitrust lawsuit if the partnership went through. Then in 2012, the FTC investigated Google again, claiming Google was wielding their 70% market share, prioritizing Google products in results, and taking bits of competitors' content, like Yelp reviews, and just putting them directly into Google Maps and search, otherwise manipulating Google tools considered essential for most consumers.

SEAN: Google’s argument was that antitrust law is meant to protect consumers, not competitors, so therefore they did nothing wrong. It worked, and after Google made some minor tweaks, the investigation was dropped. But was this actually all positive for consumers? Once Google had all that power, what did they do with it?

SEAN: Remember that algorithm from the paper, earlier? With the algorithm? It’s changed and gotten more complicated over the years, and Google doesn’t really share how exactly it works—there’s really no official guide to how search results are ranked. But for any business that operates online, or anyone that wants to share information, being higher up on Google is vital. So, like ancient people following arcane esoteric rites to please Gods for a desired outcome, webpages had to be built to please Google.

SEAN: It became an entire industry—search engine optimization, or SEO,

ED: So you have good faith SEO, people go, ‘what if we provided good information that ranked high because it's good?’ Wonderful, brilliant, great. That's the minority. The majority of SEO operators, search engine optimization people, are there to just get in the way. They're there to make sure that they rank high on a search.

SEAN: A really easy way to understand how Google affects the internet is recipes. You know how recipes always have a bunch of boring BS before you see the actual recipes? That’s because of Google. Google prioritizes pages based on how long one spends on them. So when you’re scrolling all the way down to see the damn recipe, it's because they want you to spend more time on the page. More time spent on the page, meant more time spent looking at ads, which Google profits from.

ED: That's another thing that Google could have helped with. Google could have it's pretty easy to tell, yeah, because there's 17 different pop up ads that make your phone 200 degrees. That's how you know it's an SEO operation because, but except you want to know who's serving those ads, it's fucking Google. Google AdWords. That's the thing, they don't care. In fact, the web sucking is great for them. They show you ads everywhere. You'll never find what you want.

SEAN: It’s not just recipes, obviously. The entire internet is made for Google. That means that the way we exchange information, like basically as a species, has been irrevocably changed. And that’s just search, Google has expanded into other products, building a full ecosystem

PICHAI, Google CEO: 6 of our consumer products: Search, Android, Maps, Chrome, YouTube and Google Play all have over 1 billion monthly active users each.

SEAN: That’s Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey guy who took over in 2015, speaking at one of the first earnings calls of his tenure, an early sign of the decline of Google.

ED: Google knew exactly how much they could fuck with people, and they made themselves so essential that they could make it worse very gradually.

SEAN: But you’re more likely to spend time using something good than using something bad, right? Which brings us to our next search.

SEAN: Why is Google worse now? This is a search that sometimes brings up Ed’s own reporting, you’ll see it even more if you search “who is the man who ruined Google?” Or, “Who ruined Google?”

ED: So I wrote a story back in 2024 about the man that destroyed Google search.

SEAN: The man was Prabhakar Raghavan, the executive in charge of ads at the time

ED: In 2019, something called code yellow happens. Code yellow is a situation inside Google where a number ain't going up in the way they want to. And there was query weakness, which means the number of searches people were doing on Google weren't matching up so good.

SEAN: Google was measuring their success based on how many searches people did. But if you’re a user, using the product more isn’t necessarily better: do you like when you need to search again because the first one didn't work? Still, Raghavan demanded queries go up, to the chagrin of some engineers, who expressed that on an email chain made public during one of Google’s antitrust hearings:

ED: This horrible email chain, you're looking at them as Ben Gomes and Shashi speak to this other guy and go, Hey, look, if we change things to make queries go up, that might make things worse. And indeed, there is a line, and when I read this, I had to go and check I wasn't being pranked, where Ben Gomes says, I think that all Google cares about is growth.

SEAN: But the changes, thought to actually just be rollbacks of previous more positive changes, went through.

ED: Next year, 2020, some SEO experts kind of see that things have got worse, that some spammier results have come in. And then some changes are made where it's even harder to see what results are ads or sponsored and real results

SEAN: Ads on Google searches went from boxes in the side bar, to highlighted boxes within the search results, to less obviously highlighted boxes, to this… one tiny little label saying “Ad.” This isn’t just Ed’s theory, you can actually watch Google get worse through the amount of people complaining about it online. And there’s an increase of people staying on Google after a search, instead of going to a webpage, because Google traps them there.

ED: They don't care about whether you're finding things.

SEAN: You gotta try again.

ED: Indeed, if you find something, you might leave Google. And that's not what Google's in the business of. They're not an honest business. They're in growth.

SEAN: They want to keep you there.

SEAN: Raghavan may’ve made the call, but he’s just one part of a greater problem, emphasized by the Pichai tenure, which reflects Pichai’s previous job:

ED: The CEO of Google was a McKinsey guy. McKinsey, as in, consultant brain. And consultants only see growth. They don't see people.

SEAN: It’s an insistence on growth no matter what. Schmidt and Page and Brin aren’t innocent here, but Pichai took everything they did and amplified it.

ED: It is exploitative, and they make money from the exploitation. But they're not sitting there like Gargamel or Dr claw planning. They go, Fuck. How are we going to make money from these pigs? These people seem unhappy, but they're using it a lot. We need to grow. We need growth. Growth. Money means money. Now I can't, couldn't possibly think of the consumer. It is genuinely a detachment from society.

SEAN: And now there’s a new technology that's arguably a bigger detachment from society than ever before, and promises seemingly unlimited growth.

*TECH LEADERS TALKING ABOUT AI*

SEAN: I talked to some of the people behind it.

RACHAEL: Hi. Yes.

SEAN: What happens when you introduce artificial intelligence into the tool that already has monopolistic control over all information? Again, ‘Google’ has become the word for ‘search for something online.’ But answer me this: if you were going to use a verb for “used AI” what would you use?”

*TIKTOK USERS TALKING ABOUT CHAT GPT*

SEAN: Google is this huge monolith, but for once it feels like they’re falling behind, and that’s why they’re kind of forcing it on you, even though it kinda sucks. But I don’t want to denigrate Gemini completely, because there’s a lot of invisible labor behind it, workers like you or I behind the scenes actually building the thing. Question number six: hey Gemini… Are you listening?

SEAN: I spoke with two workers with Global Logic and its subcontractors. Global Logic is a tech labor contractor owned by the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi which makes, uh…lots of stuff. They were hired by Google to provide workers to work on the language and answer aspects of Google’s AI. Workers like screenwriter Andrew Lauzon, and journalist and technical writer Rachael Sawyer, who didn't feel comfortable showing her face, but luckily Google had a solution.

ANDREW: I am a cog in a prompt engineering machine of just output, output, output.

RACHAEL if I had to describe my job in one word, I would say eerie because you're extremely siloed. You're completely alone for all of the day.

SEAN: Both are interacting with Gemini all day, then suggesting changes and often making changes themselves. And they’re expected to work very quickly.

RACHAEL: Yes, our productivity is always being logged. So, how many minutes down to the second that we spend in the tool. If we want to go take a bathroom break, we need to log out of the tool, fill out a form

SEAN: Which means they’re also rushed in their factchecking, testing, and editing. They’re often given as little as six minutes for a task.

RACHAEL: Are we putting the very best that we could out there? I don't think we are because we're simply not given the tools to do that.

SEAN: And when they don’t have time, they’re asked to do what many of us do when pressed for time: ask AI.

ANDREW: And if you didn't know something, instead of taking the time to do your own independent research, they just told us to ask Gemini, because they wanted to get as many ind data points in. They didn't want you spending an hour doing your own independent research to make sure to get it right. They were just, ‘ask Gemini, be done in five minutes and move on to the next thing.’

SEAN: They’re training the AI on the AI. Again, it’s all about speed. And while Google may not have the AI name recognition of ChatGPT they do have a different advantage: everyone already uses them every day:

PICHAI: Today, all of our two billion user products use Gemini.

SEAN: Two billion people use at least one Google product, and they just tossed AI in there. It’s everywhere. Even here. Watching me. Google is exponentially exploding the problems that broke the little search engine that these two little dorks invented and feeding it to 2 billion of us.

ED: If I made something so beautiful as Google search and I fucked up that way, I would hope my children kill me, not that I have multiple children, but I would hope they would rather be run out of town with pitchforks. Because if you make something beautiful and you share it with everyone, and you make it worse that you can make a quick buck, you are a scumbag. You are a cretin, You are a monster, honestly, burning the Library of Alexandria to feel warm. It's disgraceful. Nothing can grow forever, nothing, unless you make it worse like this.

SEAN: And they already have access to all the information online, because it was created to please them. So now when you search “chicken parmesan,” you get a recipe “based on a combination of different methods,” methods pulled and stolen from the recipes we talked about earlier, the people who were making a living off of it. Google made their tool an essential way to find information, then made people create webpages in a certain way to rank higher, then took control of most online advertising, one of the only ways to make money putting information online, put ads on everything which made websites worse, then made it so people don’t have to click on websites at all.

SEAN: So what do we do? Well, the government is trying to help: two new antitrust investigations were opened by the FTC, saying that Google had monopolized search and advertising, and it was determined that… They had. Now the Judge responsible is working on “remedies,” the anti trust version of sentencing:

ED: They're talking about selling Chrome. They're talking about Google having to share their search data with other people, as with other companies, other search engines, and they're just talking about breaking the whole damn thing up, which I think would be both very funny and a lot better for the web.

SEAN: But what can YOU do? Ed has an idea:

ED: This sounds dumb, but more people talking about it and saying Sundar Pichai, saying Prabakhar Raghavan, and this man had no SEO before me. Now all his SEO is just people talking about the article, which is so funny, because I, you know what? Someone like that. You can never take their riches or their power, but you can take their name. And I think that that is a powerful thing.

RACHAEL: These men don't have our best interests in mind. I wonder if there's any kind of stigma at all attached to exploiting people. Bringing that stigma back, making sure that we don't lionize these disruptors who are taking away the middle class and making us give up our power through these weird myths that these titans of industry have our best interest in mind.

ED: I think it becomes a class issue immediately, because a free platform that is poorly kept means that the majority of people who do not have a ton of money, will be given poorer information and be more open to manipulation.

SEAN: The internet was formed by Google, because with a little bit of good tech, massive growth, and the power of capital they were able to seize control over the very basic operations of it all. But what happens when the good tech is gone? Now, it’s just a tool for funneling cash to wealthy investors and executives. Don’t let them tell you otherwise: they’re monopolists just like the barons before them, and they need to be treated like it.

SEAN: Thank you so much for watching. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe. And, if there is a story in tech that’s making you nervous for the future of humanity, or if technofascism has affected you or your community personally, let us know in the comments or email us at stories@perfectunion.us. Or, reach out to me personally on social media. Search ‘Sean Morrow,’ on, you know, whatever.