I didn’t know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me.

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The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a “knowledge panel”, a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was “a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland”. Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.

I’m not the only one who has been struggling with Google recently. Many users are saying its principal product, its search engine, isn’t working as well as it should. They claim the ingenious vehicle that has enabled us to navigate the internet’s infinite scroll of information is beginning to rust and decay. That’s not to mention the company’s endless court battles with rival companies and world governments, or the rise of ChatGPT, which many tout as a search engine killer; even Bill Gates said last year that once a company perfects the AI assistant or “personal agent”, “you will never go to a search site again”.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anything taking Google’s place. Last year it turned 25, and Alphabet, its parent company, currently ranks as the fourth most valuable in the world, worth more than $2tn (£1.5tn). Google has a whopping 90% share of the global search market. More than a tool, it’s practically infrastructure; the connective tissue that is fundamental to how we find information online. This gives the company enormous power over politics, social attitudes and the fortunes of countless businesses – anyone and anything, in fact, that relies on the eyeballs of the internet to operate. Some say Google is too big to fail.

It doesn’t take a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland to see that right now Google search looks both deeply vulnerable and totally unstoppable. How can we be sure the company really has our interests at heart? And can we still trust it to tell us the truth?

The story of Google reads like the stereotypical tech company origin myth. A couple of computer geeks, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started a business in a garage in the late 90s and built it into one of the world’s richest companies.

At the time the web was growing fast and a few early search engines were trying to organise the chaos. Page and Brin’s bright idea was to sort webpages not just by their relevance to a search query, but also by the quality of their information. This system, PageRank, prioritised webpages based on how many other pages linked to them. The underlying concept, borrowed from academia, was that if many people linked to a specific source, then it must have high-quality information.

It worked. Coupled with Google’s clean, simple interface of a text box and a handful of blue links, the site felt like magic. “Everybody could see then that Google’s results were far better than the others’. That was the basis of everything,” says Dirk Lewandowski, interim professor of data science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, who has studied search engines for 20 years.

Google quickly garnered a great deal of trust and goodwill. Its mission to “organise the world’s information” was inspiring. If you wanted to know something, you’d ask Google. Most of the time, it would deliver the answer you sought. Gradually, the other search engines died off. Search became synonymous with Google, and “Google” became a verb, and began to expand beyond text to images and video, even mapping the physical world with Google Maps and Street View.

Success generated more success, and Google captured vast amounts of data on its users that it employed to improve search algorithms.