Google’s Hal Varian on how technology is changing economics

How has the emergence of the internet – which offers a wealth of new data, combined with new big data modelling techniques to analyse it – changed your approach to economics?

Let me first talk about my experience here at Google. We started the search engine back in 1998, and had to develop the tools to deal with large and rapidly growing amounts of information. We developed tools like ‘big table’ and ‘big query’, to use their external names. These tools enabled databases that were stretched