If you've ever wondered how Google defines the term "backrub," then look no further than its search engine for the answer, where we're told that it's "a brief massage of a person's back and shoulders." For many of the complainants in the long-running European Commission competition case against Google's alleged Web search monopoly abuse, that pithy definition goes a long way to explaining their experience of the multinational's vast online estate.

For those among you who don't know your Google history, the search engine started out with the curious name of BackRub at Stanford 20 years ago, until, that is, its servers greedily gobbled their way through the university's bandwidth, and it was time for the cofounders to shift up a gear. A year earlier, in 1995, the planets had aligned when Larry met Sergey at the famous Californian university for the first time.

The two men eventually created an algorithm—dubbed PageRank after Larry Page—that recognised links from important sources, while penalising links that were less relevant. Their BackRub search tool sorted results by relevance, and only looked for words in page titles. The end result was a search engine that appeared to be far superior to the competition of the time, such as Alta Vista.

Indeed, Brin and Page made clear their intentions in a Stanford paper in 1996, entitled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

They explained the rationale behind their academic project, now known as Google in recognition of the word "Googol," which means a large number that—written out explicitly—looks like this.

The prototype search engine at that point had "a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages," having been designed to not only "crawl and index the Web efficiently," but to do so at a vast scale—so its potential power was clear. It has been well documented—and at times heavily lampooned—that Google, in its early years, had a corporate motto that said "don't be evil."

Returning to the nuts and bolts of the BackRub paper, that slogan is writ large.

Here's a cracking example of Sergey Brin and Page's lofty intentions for Google, in direct response to what they described at the time as "insidious" search engine bias among other players in what was then a nascent market:

In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising-supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Google, however, would eventually grow to be the biggest ad broker in the world. Its brand became a verb, different tech products sprouted out from the Googleplex, and—for many ordinary folk—Google is the Internet.

Fast forward to 2013, and then-Google chairman Eric Schmidt cowrote a book—The New Digital Age—in which he acknowledged the power his company now wielded online. Schmidt said in the intro to his somewhat pompous tome:

We believe that modern technology platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, are even more powerful than most people realise, and our future world will be profoundly altered by their adoption and successfulness in societies everywhere. These platforms constitute a true paradigm shift, akin to the invention of television, and what gives them their power is their ability to grow—specifically, the speed at which they scale. Almost nothing short of a biological virus can spread as quickly, efficiently or aggressively as these technology platforms, and this makes the people who build, control, and use them powerful too.

And on that final point Schmidt is absolutely right. The Googles of this world, then, have a duty to their users and customers not to mistreat that power.

Here in Europe, however, Google's monopolistic abuse of dominance in the search market continues to dog it, in an antitrust case that isn't questioning its innovative prowess, but is instead challenging accusations about its brutish behaviour which have—it is claimed—hit businesses of all shapes and sizes across the EU.

Google has already been formally charged twice over its monopoly abuse. It stands accused of systematically favouring its own price comparison shopping product over that of its rivals in Web search. More recently, the European Commission concluded in a preliminary decision that Google had abused its dominant position by imposing restrictions on Android device makers.

It's understood that, in a matter of weeks, Google will also face a record-breaking fine rumoured to be around $3 billion, which—based on Alphabet Inc's 2015 figures—represents a little under five percent of its annual turnover. More significantly, however, Google will also be told by the commission's antitrust officials to stop manipulating its search results.

Listing image by Joi Ito