10 Hilarious Memes That Perfectly Sum Up Google As A Company

No matter how much they expand as a company into other sectors, Google will always be known first and foremost for its search engine and it remains one of its best products too. Though intrusive adverts and odd changes have drawn some concerns, Google Search is still fast, reliable, and gives largely accurate results.

That's why, for a lot of internet users, the only purpose of other search engines like Bing is as a gateway to get to Google. Though the force of habit might play a part in that, it's still a demonstration of just how much and how long Google has been dominant.

Although the announcement of the Stadia shutdown came as a disappointment to its loyal community of users, it's fair to say that it probably wasn't a huge group with Forbes reporting it was likely well below the 1 million monthly active users it aimed for at the beginning.

That's likely a big part of why the Stadia is shutting down as Google would certainly have been aware of these disappointing numbers for a long time now. Even so, it was devastating news to the community the service had cultivated. Google's promise to refund its users went a long way to mitigating the blow at least.

It's fair to say that Google has had its fair share of scandals and negative press when it comes to matters of privacy, with the company often found to be collecting and keeping far more data than it let on. More recently, however, the company seems to have committed to putting slightly more of a focus on privacy and security.

From encouraging its users to become more literate in what information they're giving away online to their very own security features like the solid Google password manager that comes with Google Chrome, they've made positive changes but it's easy to see why some consider it ironic considering Google's history.

Unfortunately, for every positive step Google takes as a company, there's often an unintended downside. In the case of their improved security and privacy features, it has often meant more inconvenient notifications and extra verification steps involved with every new sign-in and change of device.

Though their measures would likely help out in the event of an actual hack, it's more fun to imagine that their zealousness serves no other purpose than to irritate their users and they'd turn a blind eye to an actual security issue.

For all the less positive headlines, it's impossible to ignore just how reliable Google is in terms of keeping its services running properly. Even other giants like Meta have suffered notable outages this year and Reddit has been as inconsistent as ever but Google services are usually the last to fail.

That includes crucial services like Google Maps, Google Translate, and Google Docs as well so it's easy to see why Google's reliability is one of its biggest pluses. Even when other companies offer more attractive products, reliability helps to ensure that Google is nearly always people's go-to.

When it comes to the most popular web browsers, Google Chrome still continually ranks as the most popular of all thanks to a user-friendly UI and a ton of bonus features including no shortage of helpful extensions. There's only one downside to the company's impressive dominance in the area.

As anyone who's attempted to use Chrome on a lower-end PC or tried to keep it open while doing other demanding tasks will know, Google's browser is incredibly hungry when it comes to memory. Though it has gotten better, Chrome's computational demands are still enough to make anyone flinch.

Although its products will always take the biggest headlines, adverts are what power Google, accounting for a huge chunk of the company's revenue. With that said, it's no surprise they're very good at personalizing ads for individual users based on their demographic and search history.

The only problem is that when targeted advertising does work as it's supposed to, it can be uncanny and that's a big reason why many opt out of it. On the other hand, irrelevant ads can be even more of an inconvenience to users and Google ends up taking the blame either way.

Standing out in a smartphone market dominated by sleek iPhones and futuristic Samsungs is no easy task but Google has taken some interesting approaches to the problem. As well as packing Google Pixels with useful bonus features, they also seem to enjoy producing unique designs that look like nothing else on the market.

Whilst that might mean an unfortunate resemblance to the visor-wearing Geordi La Forge in the case of the Pixel 6, the new Pixel 7 is slightly more subtle with the camera ridge and Google will be hoping it results in a more attractive phone to customers.

Whilst work auto-saving to the cloud now seems like a standard for similar programs these days, it's worth remembering how Google contributed to that by making it one of the main selling points of Google Docs. Whereas accidentally failing to save a piece of work was once a big concern when writing documents, Docs took the matter out of the user's hands.

Of course, for users who had developed a paranoia about losing work and learned to automatically save every so often, the change to an auto-saving system like Docs uses could take some getting used to.