Last week, Google celebrated its 18th birthday, and after 18 years, the search engine's world takeover is going swimmingly. Roughly a billion people around the world now use each of Google's most popular services: Chrome, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, and YouTube. By the company's estimates, that's nearly a third of the global online population on each service.
Indeed, we've reached a point where it's basically impossible to escape the Google's grasp on our lives, writes Vlad Savov at The Verge: "Even if you use Bing to search the web on Firefox, and you ignore Google Photos, Gmail, and Drive for Flickr, Yahoo Mail, and Dropbox, eventually someone will send you a YouTube clip."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
5 hilariously cutting cartoons about the Department of EducationCartoons Artists take on being rotten to the core, budget cuts, and more
-
Kartoffelsalat (potato salad) recipeThe Week Recommends German dish is fresh, creamy and an ideal summer meal
-
Sickness benefits: an unaffordable burden?Talking Point A welfare bill 'debacle' caused by 'sickfluencers' who are beating the system
-
Dollar faces historic slump as stocks hit new highSpeed Read While stocks have recovered post-Trump tariffs, the dollar has weakened more than 10% this year
-
Economists fear US inflation data less reliablespeed read The Labor Department is collecting less data for its consumer price index due to staffing shortages
-
Crypto firm Coinbase hacked, faces SEC scrutinySpeed Read The Securities and Exchange Commission has also been investigating whether Coinbase misstated its user numbers in past disclosures
-
Starbucks baristas strike over dress codespeed read The new uniform 'puts the burden on baristas' to buy new clothes, said a Starbucks Workers United union delegate
-
Warren Buffet announces surprise retirementspeed read At the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the billionaire investor named Vice Chairman Greg Abel his replacement
-
Trump calls Amazon's Bezos over tariff displaySpeed Read The president was not happy with reports that Amazon would list the added cost from tariffs alongside product prices
-
Markets notch worst quarter in years as new tariffs loomSpeed Read The S&P 500 is on track for its worst month since 2022 as investors brace for Trump's tariffs
-
Tesla Cybertrucks recalled over dislodging panelsSpeed Read Almost every Cybertruck in the US has been recalled over a stainless steel panel that could fall off
