Google 2010 Annual Report Download - page 4

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to travel, and above all they were free from fear of their own government.
That small but powerful piece of information drove my family to ee the
Soviet Union two years later and start a new life in the United States.
Today the vast majority of the worlds population has access to mobile
phones, and over two billion people are connected to the Internet. As a result,
the trickle of information that made its way into closed societies such as the
USSR when I was a child has now become a torrentand millions of people
living under totalitarian regimes are able to glimpse freedom every day of
their lives, albeit virtually.
While the trends in technology and communication that made this all possible
have been clear for decades, I believe we have now reached an important
in ection point. As I write this letter, a wave of change is passing through the
Middle East and North Africa. I cannot predict what countries it will touch,
or what the state of the world will be by the time you read this in two months.
But I can be certain of one thing: access to information will play a key role.
Access to Information
We founded Google to help connect people to the information they need
and we have been obsessively focused on that goal ever since. Today,
hundreds of millions of people rely on Google to search through many
petabytes of the worlds knowledge. We do it across nations, languages
and cultures, for information that's both online and oɞ ine, on PCs and
tablets, phones and televisions, with text and images and video and sound
whatever it takes.