Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
In this season of Land of the Giants, sponsored by Yext. Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine. Google promoted its own Google branded content over its rivals, even though the rivals would otherwise have had top billing through an organic search algorithm. It wasn't supposed to be this way.
Google was supposed to be the happiest of the tech giants. The one with the colorful logo and the fun doodles. And a really ambitious vision. Our mission is to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful. That means that Google would basically understand everything in the world, and it would understand exactly what you wanted and give you the right thing. It's a company that started with lofty ideals. You know, look, we have our core value. It's don't be evil.
But as Google has grown, those ideals have become harder to live up to. They meant the don't be evil thing. And what I would tell people is Google doesn't always do the right thing. Sometimes it's not clear what the right thing is. I'm Shereen Ghaffari. And I'm Alex Kantrowitz. We're hosting the new season of Land of the Giants, the podcast that explores the biggest tech companies of our time.
This season we're tackling the most powerful: Google. Google is the gateway to the internet for billions of people. From Gmail to Google Maps, YouTube to Android. You can't imagine an internet without Google. So every decision Google makes about its products can change how we navigate the world and how we understand it. This season we're looking at how the company is grappling with organizing the world's information when the very nature of what is fact and what is false is up for debate.
They were going to search all the world and collate all the world's information. The problem is they ran into the world and they didn't care. Like, we don't care about copyright. We don't care about misinformation. With the U.S. government now accusing Google of being a monopoly, we're going to explore how it got so big and why it needed to, what its size means for us, and whether there's anything that can check its power. The more people who use the internet, the more money Google makes. And I'm not entirely sure how you rein that in.
Land of the Giants, the Google Empire, from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. When's our first episode? Let me Google that for you. Our series begins on Tuesday, February 16th. Subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.