Happy Birthday, Google!
Today Google officially celebrates its 20th birthday, how time flies! A lot happened in 1998. DVDs were released onto the UK market for the first time, Titanic won 11 Oscars at the 70th Academy Awards, Victoria and David Beckham got engaged and Ford launched the Ford Focus range, which has since sold 16 million cars.
However, for everyone who now uses the phrase ‘I’ll Google it’, one of the most significant things that happened in 1998 was the birth of Google. It wasn’t the first search engine, of course. Before Google was born, we used to Ask Jeeves a question or turn to Yahoo to find the answer.
And before any search engine existed… anyone remember encyclopedias, or going to the local library to try and find the information you needed? There are many professions – and our day-to-day lives, of course – which are made much easier through the use of Google. PR is definitely one of them! Checking facts, finding research reports and staying on top of the latest tech trends are just a few buttons and clicks away.
But it’s not just how we write the stories that get into the news that’s changed, it’s how the news is now consumed. Content can now be read and digested globally within seconds, creating millions of headlines to sift through and far more information available than would ever be possible to read.
In fact, a quick search of ‘cyber security breach’ on Google brings up 27,400,000 results. Sifting through 27,400,000 results would be impossible!
So what does this teach us?
It shows how valuable content really is – and it’s an incredibly powerful PR tool when it’s used correctly. With a lot of noise out there, it’s now more important than ever that every piece of content has the right message, is placed on the right platform, to ensure it is read by the right people.
And don’t forget, PR and SEO go hand in hand. Read our blog to find out why they’re really the best of friends.
