Google turns 15: Search giant enters mid-teen Android years

Google has officially turned 15 marking a milestone moment in the search-turned-hardware and software giant's history.
While Google has celebrated the news, like all teenagers, Google's fifteenth year looks set to be a turbulent one. This is because despite concerns from privacy groups, having taken control of well over 90 percent of the search market, Google has been increasingly eager to create new ways to monetise its valuable customer data over the last half decade.
The story of Google and its quest for customer data, as all great start-ups do, started in a basement, where in September 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the first iteration of Google Search. Taking on the then embedded leaders, like former heavyweight Yahoo, Google proved a hit and by July 2000 the search engine was listed as the world's most popular, responsible for one billion indexes.
Riding off the early success and clearly realising the value of its search data, Google decided to embark on a wave of service releases designed to expand and refine the amount of data it could collect. This started in 2001 when it expanded its search engine to offer image search to its users. However it was only in 2005 when Google really hit its stride, releasing its Earth, Maps, Talk and Video services and making what could be argued as its most important purchase to date - Android.
The purchase of Android was a clear bid by Google to increase the data it could collect, with smartphones and tablets running the OS offering the firm a means to collect previously unknown information, like customer location data. Aware of this, Google's focus has gradually shifted to devices as well as software, with the company releasing its first own-brand Nexus device, the Nexus One in 2010 and buying former mobile heavyweight Motorola in 2011.
Since then Google's device and software development business has boomed, with Android currently being listed as the most used mobile operating system in the world. However, the success has come with a cost, with numerous privacy groups getting increasingly angry about the amount of data Google's storing. This anger culminated over the summer when it was revealed Google was one of the main companies targeted by the NSA during its PRISM campaign - which saw the agency siphon vast amounts of customer data from Google.
Unperturbed by this, Google's unveiled its latest KitKat Android version and has pushed forward with the development of its Google Glass wearable computer - a device again surrounded by privacy concerns. For this reason, while Google's first 15 years may have been entirely focused on collecting customer data, its next 15 may well be about finding ways to secure it and win back concerned customers trust - a fact apparently not lost on Google, which according to recent reports has begun working to better encrypt data being stored and passing through its data centres.