Google's uncertain future

As Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially step down, the company is at a crossroads

Google logo.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Asya_mix/iStock, Wikimedia Commons)

It's a story synonymous with the birth of the mainstream internet. In the mid-1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students at Stanford, started work on a project to rank web pages and let people search for things. That little project of course became Google, a service now so ubiquitous it's a verb, while Page and Brin became Silicon Valley legends. This week, Page and Brin announced they are officially stepping down as the leaders of Google's parent company and will now take on a more supervisory role.

It is thus tempting to say that an era is over. But Brin and Page had stepped away from the everyday running of their company some time ago. Instead, it is perhaps more interesting to think about how the company they started is at something of a crossroads, currently caught between their search-based past, and their AI-powered future.

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Navneet Alang

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based out of Toronto. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New Republic, Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt.