2 August 2013

Has Google become the new instant biographer?

02 August 2013

Today news travels fast on the internet, we can find out what is happening in Spain before the news stations have time to run a story. In addition, 50 years ago during Ty Cobb time you could have edited the facts with cover ups to deceive the public. However, today that would be much harder given that everyone has a smart phone, which makes it harder to get away with doing dumb things as everyone is always taking photos and videos.

A biography or simply bio is a detailed description or account of a person’s life. It entails more than basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death) – a biography also portrays a subject’s experience of these events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject’s life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject’s personality.

Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person’s life. Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend’s (Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million). In January 2013, Google announced it had earned $50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time the company had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion.

Today with the internet and smart devices the world is becoming more connected than it has ever been and the court of public opinion a lot stronger. As human beings, we are all connected and share a common decency thus unlike 50 years ago we get the internet version of the facts a lot sooner rather than having to wait for the biography documenting a person’s life. This leaves us to ask the obvious question which is would Ty Cobb be a baseball great if if his career and life was played out today? While you should not believe everything you read on the internet (People will lie on the internet trust me on this one) it does provide us with instant info on our modern day villains or heros but try to use your own judgement.

Nexonta Technologies Inc