La schiacciante supremazia di Google

Google began strictly as a search company, and it’s still their bread and butter. However, as the company has grown, it’s spread its tentacles like a giant octopus out to most parts of the Web. A benevolent giant octopus, providing lots of highly useful services, but a giant nonetheless. Try surfing the Web without touching a single Google service. It’s impossible.

Google even shows up in places you’d never expect it to. For example, you know those “captchas” that websites and online forums use to verify that you’re human? Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is currently using the captcha input from hundreds of millions of users to improve its text recognition software.

But that’s just a tiny little service. Let’s see where Google has a more dominant presence, starting with, but not ending with, search.

L’impressionante progressione di Google in tutti i settori del Web, dalla ricerca, all’advertisement, ai media.

Monopolio o no, rischi o no, dal punto di vista tecnologico ed economico si tratta di un fenomeno senza precedenti (se non altro per la scala globale su cui opera).

Il resto delle statistiche su Royal Pingdom.