Google
This article is about the company. For the search engine provided by the company,
see Google Search. For the parent company with the stock tickers GOOG and GOOGL,
see Alphabet Inc. For the number, see Googol. For other uses, see Google (disambiguation).
Google LLC
The Google logo used since 2015
Google's headquarters, the Googleplex
Formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017)
Company type Subsidiary
Traded as Nasdaq: GOOGL
Nasdaq: GOOG
Industry Internet
Cloud computing
Computer software
Computer hardware
Artificial intelligence
Advertising
Founded September 4, 1998; 27 years
ago[a] in Menlo Park, California,
United States
Founders Larry Page
Sergey Brin
Headquarters Googleplex,
Mountain View, California
U.S.
Area served Worldwide
Key people John L. Hennessy (Chairman)
Sundar Pichai (CEO)
Ruth
Porat (President and CIO)
Anat Ashkenazi (CFO)
Products Google Search
Android
Nest
Pixel
Workspace
Fitbit
Waze
YouTube
Gemini
Full list
Number of 187,000 (2022)
employees
Parent Alphabet Inc.
Subsidiaries Adscape
Cameyo
Charleston Road Registry
Endoxon
FeedBurner
ImageAmerica
Kaltix
Nest Labs
reCAPTCHA
X Development
YouTube
ZipDash
ASN 15169
Website [Link]
Footnotes / references
[5][6][7][8]
Google LLC (/ˈɡuː.ɡəl/ ⓘ, GOO-gəl) is an American multinational technology corporation
focused on information technology, online advertising, search
engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce,
consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI).[9] It has been referred to as "the most
powerful company in the world" by the BBC,[10] and is one of the world's most valuable
brands.[11][12][13] Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has been described as a Big
Tech company.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry
Page and Sergey Brin. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control
56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company
went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a
wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is
a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was
appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO
of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.[14]
After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as "Google"), the
company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. These products
address a wide range of use cases, including email (Gmail), navigation and mapping
(Waze, Maps, and Earth), cloud computing (Cloud), web navigation (Chrome), video sharing
(YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android and ChromeOS), cloud
storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage
(Photos), videotelephony (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable
technology (Pixel Watch and Fitbit), music streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand
(YouTube TV), AI (Google Assistant and Gemini), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI
chips (TPU), and more. Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective
industries, as is Google Search. Discontinued Google products include gaming (Stadia),
[15]
Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail.[16][17] Google's
other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum
computing (Willow), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind).
[18]
Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide, followed
by Facebook, Instagram, and ChatGPT. Google is the largest provider of search engines,
mapping and navigation applications, email services, office suites, online video platforms,
photo and cloud storage, mobile operating systems, web browsers, machine learning
frameworks, and AI virtual assistants in the world as measured by market share.[19] On the
list of the most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by Forbes as of January 2022,
[20]
and is fourth by Interbrand as of February 2022.[21] The company has received
criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search
neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.[22]
History
Main articles: History of Google and List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet
See also: Alphabet Inc.
Early years
Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they
were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States.[23][24][25] The
project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead
programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left
before Google was officially founded as a company;[26][27] Hassan went on to pursue a career
in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.[28][29]
Then chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt (left) with co-
founders Sergey Brin (center) and Larry Page (right) in 2008
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search
terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the
relationships among websites.[30] They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined a
website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked
back to the original site.[31][30] Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to
implement Page's ideas.[26] Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage
as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.[32]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub" because the system
checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[23][33][34] Hassan, as well as Alan
Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of
Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first
paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search
engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeffrey Ullman were also cited as
contributors to the project.[35] PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-
scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page's
PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create
the Chinese search engine Baidu.[36][37]
Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a
misspelling of the word googol,[23][38][39] a very large number written 10100 (1 followed by 100
zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of
information.[40] Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000
from Andy Bechtolsheim,[23] co-founder of Sun Microsystems. This initial investment served
as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds.[41][42] Page and Brin
initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford,
and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded,
Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. David arranged a meeting with Page and Brin and
his Granite co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The meeting was set for 8 a.m. at the front porch
of David's home in Palo Alto and it had to be brief because Andy had another meeting
at Cisco, where he now worked after the acquisition, at 9 a.m. Andy briefly tested a demo of
the website, liked what he saw, and then went back to his car to grab the check. David
Cheriton later also joined in with a $250,000 investment.[43][44]
Google's original homepage had a simplistic
design because the company founders had little experience in HTML, the markup
language used for designing web pages.[45]
Google received money from two other angel investors in 1998,
including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.[46] Page and Brin had
first approached Shriram, who was a venture capitalist, for funding and counsel, and Shriram
invested $250,000 in Google in February 1998. Shriram knew Bezos because Amazon had
acquired Junglee, at which Shriram was the president. It was Shrir