Short answers, pulled from the story.
Google Search was originally developed in 1996 by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan. The search engine was set up in the garage of Susan Wojcicki's home in Menlo Park, California.
As of 2025, Google Search holds a 90% share of the global search engine market, making it by far the dominant search engine worldwide.
PageRank is a patented algorithm developed by Larry Page that ranks web pages by analyzing links from other pages, on the assumption that pages linked from many important pages are themselves important. The algorithm computes a recursive score based on the weighted sum of linking pages. Google's full ranking system is now reported to include over 250 different indicators.
AI Overviews rolled out to US users in May 2024 and quickly drew criticism after errors went viral, including results suggesting users add glue to pizza, eat rocks, or incorrectly stating that Barack Obama is Muslim. Google made technical changes within two weeks, scaling back the feature and pausing it for some health-related queries.
On the 5th of August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by paying phone makers and browser developers large sums to install Google as the default search engine, maintaining its market dominance through those agreements rather than on merit alone.
Google pays Apple 36% of all search advertising revenue generated when users access Google through the Safari browser. This figure was disclosed by an economics professor at the University of Chicago during the 2023 antitrust trial, and the total revenue involved is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.