Top 10 world-changing ideas from Google: Android, Street View and Glass

Ten years on from its stock market debut, we look back at some of the innovations that have boosted Google's strength

Here's a sobering thought: if you'd invested $10,000 in Google when it launched on the stock market on 19 August 2004 at $85 a share, you'd now be sitting on an investment of around $70,000, with its share price hovering around $600.

This growth has come over a period of intense innovation and energy at Google, which has seen it bring numerous market-changing ideas to the world, ranging from mapping tools to mobile platforms.

To celebrate this 10-year period that has seen its efforts change the face of many markets, while pleasing the money men, V3 has listed 10 of the biggest ideas that Google has had and how they've changed the technology market - and the world - for good.

10. Business app battleground

As a web-based company, Google has championed the ability of the browser to serve as a runtime environment for delivering applications as well as just web pages. This has been demonstrated by its development of increasingly sophisticated applications such as the Google Docs suite and Google Apps over the past decade or so.

Actually, Google Docs started out as a web-based word processor called Writely, which Google saw the potential of and acquired its developer, Upstartle, in 2006. The same happened with Google Sheets, which originated as a project called XL2Web by 2Web Technologies.

Today Google's online apps are integrated with its online storage service, Google Drive, and widely used. The online giant also has an equally popular business version, Google Apps for Business, combining its Gmail service with the Docs suite and management tools for IT administrators.

This has seen Google become a major challenger to numerous firms, chiefly Microsoft, which would never have imagined a search company would become an enterprise gunning for its market.

Top 10 world-changing ideas from Google: Android, Street View and Glass

Ten years on from its stock market debut, we look back at some of the innovations that have boosted Google's strength

9. Altering the advertising market

Google may have started life as a web search engine project, but its efforts to monetise the success of its search algorithm have resulted in its profits largely being derived from adverts associated with search results. In fact, 96 percent of Google's revenue in 2011 was derived from its advertising programmes, arguably making it more of an advertising firm than anything else.

The firm began selling advertisements associated with search keywords sometime around the year 2000. The move has proven wildly successful, so much so that Google has had plenty of funds to plough into research and development of other technologies such as Google Maps and, most recently, its driverless car project.

Advertising against search results has proven controversial, however, especially with claims that so-called click fraud has inflated the amount of money that advertisers have paid to Google for responses to adverts served through its AdWords service.

8. Opening up bug bounties

Bug bounties have been a staple way open source projects have worked to improve their security for quite some time. However, in October 2013 Google took them to the next level when it announced a major change to its Vulnerability Reward Program that broadened its scope outside of core products to include a number of high-risk free software applications and libraries designed for networking or for low-level operating system functionality.

With rewards ranging from $500 all the way up to $3,100 the bounty programme was a hit with numerous bug hunters and helped improve the security of numerous projects. In fact the move was so successful, that in the months following the policy change numerous other technology companies, including Microsoft and Mozilla, began tweaking their own bug bounty programs to be similarly open.

Considering the growing number of cyber criminal operations appearing we can't help but be a little grateful to Google for getting the ball rolling and extending the remit of bug bounties.

7. Motoring 2.0

In a bid to give insurance companies a major headache, Google is driving ahead with the development of its driverless car concept. Embracing the peak of the Internet of Things, the search giant's web-powered car has no steering wheel or pedals, and instead simply features a start-stop button.

While this approach might require the average driver to take a significant leap of faith, Google reports that is driverless cars have already covered 700,000 miles of Californian tarmac without any accidents. This arguably makes Google's car tech safer than the average driver.

Hoverer, Google has gone on to court controversy, and the company's Dmitri Dolgov told Reuters earlier in August that the driverless car will exceed speed limits by up to 10mph in order to keep up with surrounding vehicles that are also breaking the speed limit.

How this will work in theory is currently academic, but in 2015 the UK will allow driverless cars onto public roads for the first time, sparking either car calamity or a new era of motoring.

Top 10 world-changing ideas from Google: Android, Street View and Glass

Ten years on from its stock market debut, we look back at some of the innovations that have boosted Google's strength

6. Street View: photographing the world

It must have been an interesting meeting when someone at Google proposed photographing the entire world. But clearly not put off but the complexities, costs or challenges it would bring, Google gave the green light and Street View was off.

It's easy to take it for granted now but the concept of photographing every street around the world and making that information visible for free to the world is quite something when you sit back and think about it.

Despite this apparent altruism Google ran into numerous issues with the project, due to the fact its cars were found to be hoovering up WiFi data from homes and businesses as they drove past, despite never gaining any consent to do so.

This angered many, and numerous regulators took Google to task over this. However, Street View remains a stalwart of Google's offerings and a lifesaver for anyone keen to check out a location before they set off, from the comfort of their own home.

5. Google Glass: the wearable revolution

Despite still being in its beta Explorer phase, Google's Glass technology has already caused waves globally and is leading the charge of the new era of wearables. This is because the technology has the potential to revolutionise the way we do business and run our daily lives.

For example, we've already seen developers create a variety of interesting applications for Glass. These include real-time language translators, interactive star maps and even augmented reality how-to guides.

We can't wait to see how Google's Glass technology develops and improves as the Explorer programme continues. For a look at the best features the technology has to offer, check out our top 10 Google Glass uses that could revolutionise business feature.

Top 10 world-changing ideas from Google: Android, Street View and Glass

Ten years on from its stock market debut, we look back at some of the innovations that have boosted Google's strength

4. Taking laptops to the cloud

Google Chrome started out as an innovative, ultra-low demand, web browser. While the browser itself is pretty awesome, offering a nicer user interface and significantly better performance than many competitors - such as *cough* Internet Explorer - it wasn't initially a game changer.

However since then Chrome has grown to become something far more interesting and has been developed by Google into to a full-on cloud-focused operating system. Chrome OS's cloud focus is particularly interesting for a variety of reasons, chief of which is its performance-boosting powers.

When connected to WiFi, 3G or 4G, Chrome OS offloads the majority of the heavy lifting, traditionally tasked to the device's processor, into the cloud. This means that Chrome OS laptops can run using much lower-powered components than competing Mac OS or Windows machines, while offering competing performance.

Considering the cloud revolution currently sweeping Europe, we can't help but think Google's Chrome OS will become an increasingly common and popular choice for businesses and have to applaud the firm for its forward thinking.

3. Maps meet apps

For many people born in the noughties, an atlas will be an alien concept. This is thanks to Google Maps. The ubiquitous location and navigation service has made planning routes across the globe an almost trivial pursuit, thanks to access via browser or mobile apps.

Google Maps has pretty much set the standard for free mapping software. This was made evident when the Google Maps app for iOS was removed from Apple's App Store to make way for Apple's own take on mobile mapping.

After Apple's attempt met a barrage of scorn, Google Maps was returned to the App Store a few months later. Within days is had exceeded 10 million downloads, indicating how popular it had become with users.

Its popularity is not surprising, as Google has stuffed Maps with features including turn-by-turn navigation, street view, voice control and the ability to highlight interesting nearby attractions.

The core of its success comes from Google's commitment to mapping out 28 million miles of road across 194 countries, since starting in 2005. This Herculean effort has translated into staggering use, with around a billion people using Google Maps every month.

Top 10 world-changing ideas from Google: Android, Street View and Glass

Ten years on from its stock market debut, we look back at some of the innovations that have boosted Google's strength

2. Android smartphone efforts

Google certainly wasn't the first technology firm to get into the smartphone race. Debatably this was actually IBM with its 1994 Simon PDA/phone. Indeed, when Google bought Android in 2005, the smartphone market was barely even established.

Fast-forward a few years, though, and Apple was running away with the market, as its iPhone destroyed all that came before it, notably BlackBerry and Nokia, which lost huge numbers of customers.

However, Google fought back and Android has now become a real competitor to Apple. By making the Android mobile OS, based on Linux, free to use for any smartphone maker, Android has grown from a minor player into the most common mobile operating system in the world, and for good reason.

Thanks to Android's open and customisable nature, handset makers have been able to bring their own innovations to market significantly faster than Apple.

This is the key reason why we have handsets covering every price, size and user case you can think of at the moment, rather than being limited to a single vendor's yearly flagship, as Apple would have liked.

1. Search keeps on giving

The tool that started it all. Google has never stopped altering, tweaking and improving its search engine, as it knows that whatever else it does, this is the function that remains key to all its other successes.

In the past year alone the company has made almost 900 tweaks to the service, according to Amit Singhal, Google head of search. It's clearly paying off because, despite having 10 years to fight back, no-one is close to Google in the search market.

New features such as autocomplete, traffic data and translations are now part and parcel of the service, while its mobile offerings including voice search and contextual information as standard.

While it may not be the most attention-grabbing area of Google, search remains central to it all and no doubt come 2014 it will still be there, leading the company's charge into new areas.