his article is about the company. For the search engine, see Google Search.

For other uses,

see Google (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Googol.

Google LLC

Google's logo since 2015

Google's headquarters, the Googleplex

Formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017)

Type Subsidiary

 Internet
Industry
 Cloud computing
 Computer software
 Computer hardware
 Artificial intelligence
 Advertising

Founded September 4, 1998; 21 years

ago[a] in Menlo Park, California, U.S.

Founders  Larry Page

 Sergey Brin
 Headquarters 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,

Mountain View, California

U.S.

Area served Worldwide

Key people  Sundar Pichai (CEO)

 Ruth Porat (CFO)

Products List of Google products

Revenue 66,001,000,000 US dollar (2014)

Operating income 16,496,000,000 US dollar (2014)

Net income 14,444,000,000 United States

dollar (2014[5])

Total assets 131,133,000,000 US dollar (2014)

Number of 114,096 (Q3 2019)

employees

Parent Alphabet Inc. (2015–present)

Subsidiaries List of subsidiaries

Website google.com

Footnotes / references
[6][7][8][9]

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related

services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud
computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies,
alongside Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.[10][11]
 Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D.
students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares and
control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated
Google as a California privately held company on September 4, 1998, in California. Google was then
reincorporated in Delaware on October 22, 2002.[12] An initial public offering (IPO) took place on
August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed
the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a
conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's leading subsidiary and will continue to be
the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of
Google, replacing Larry Page who became the CEO of Alphabet.
The company's rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and
partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers services designed for
work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling
and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), instant messaging and
video chat (Duo, Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation
(Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google
Keep), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos). The company leads the development of
the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a
lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. Google has moved increasingly into
hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of
its Nexus devices, and it released multiple hardware products in October 2016, including the Google
Pixel smartphone, Google Home smart speaker, Google Wifi mesh wireless router, and Google
Daydream virtual reality headset. Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier
(Google Fiber, Google Fi, and Google Station).[13]
Google.com is the most visited website in the world.[14] Several other Google services also figure in
the top 100 most visited websites, including YouTube and Blogger. Google was the most valuable
brand in the world as of 2017,[15] but has received significant criticism involving issues such
as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, antitrust, censorship, and search neutrality. Google's mission
statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The
company's unofficial slogan "Don't be evil" was removed from the company's code of conduct
around May 2018, but reinstated by July 31, 2018.[16][17]

Contents

 1History
o 1.1Early years
o 1.2Growth
o 1.3Initial public offering
o 1.42012 onward
 2Products and services
o 2.1Search engine
o 2.2Advertising
o 2.3Consumer services
 2.3.1Web-based services
 2.3.2Software
 2.3.3Hardware
o 2.4Enterprise services
o 2.5Internet services
o 2.6Other products
 3Corporate affairs
o 3.1Finance
o 3.2Corporate identity
o 3.3Workplace culture
o 3.4Office locations
o 3.5Infrastructure
o 3.6Environment
o 3.7Philanthropy
 4Criticism and controversy
o 4.1Litigation
 5See also
 6Notes
 7References
 8Further reading
 9External links

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 when they were
both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.[18] 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;[19][20] Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow
Garage in 2006.[21][22]
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.[23] 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.[24][25] Page told his
ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas.[19]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked
backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[26][27][28] 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 Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project.[29] PageRank was influenced by
a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in
1996, with Larry Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later
went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.[30][31][32]
Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a
misspelling of the word "googol",[33][34] the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to
signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.[35]

Google's original homepage had a simple design because the company founders had little experience
in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages.[36]

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[37] and the company was
incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki[18])
in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first
employee.[18][38][39]
Google was initially funded by an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim,
co-founder of Sun Microsystems; the money was given before Google was incorporated.[40] Google
received money from three other angel investors in 1998: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Stanford
University computer science professor David Cheriton, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.[41] Between
these initial investors, friends, and family Google raised around 1 million dollars, which is what
allowed them to open up their original shop in Menlo Park, California [42]
After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999,[41] a new $25 million
round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999,[43] with major investors including the venture
capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.[40]

Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California,[44] which is home to several
prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.[45] The next year, Google began selling advertisements
associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-
funded search engine.[46][18] To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-
based.[47] In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine
provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.[48][49]
Google's first production server.[50]

In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon
Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.[51] The complex became
known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol
zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[52] By that time, the
name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to
the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: "to use
the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet".[53][54] Additionally, in 2001 Google's
Investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric
Schmidt as the Chairman and CEO of Google [55]

Initial public offering

Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later, on August 19, 2004. At that time
Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the
year 2024.[56] At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[57][58] Shares
were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse,
underwriters for the deal.[59][60] The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more
than $23 billion.[61]
Eric Schmidt

In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for
$1.65 billion in Google stock,[62][63] and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[64][65] On April 13,
2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google
valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies.[66]
In 2005, The Washington Post reported on a 700 percent increase in third-quarter profit for Google,
largely thanks to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines,
and television to the Internet.[67] In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google
surpassed one billion for the first time.[68] By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion
searches per day. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with some
several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever changing
workload more efficiently.[55]
On August 15, 2011, Google made its largest-ever acquisition to date when it announced that it
would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion[69][70] This purchase was made in part to help Google
gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to help
protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other
companies,[71] mainly Apple and Microsoft,[72] and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.[73]

2012 onward
The year 2012 was the first time that Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue, generating
$38 billion the previous year. In January 2013, then-CEO Larry Page commented, "We ended 2012
with a strong quarter ... Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we
hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year – not a bad achievement in just a decade and a
half."[74]
In June 2013, Google acquired Waze, a $966 million deal.[75] While Waze would remain an
independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly
valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service.[76]
Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led
by Apple, Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official public statement, Page explained that the
"health and well-being" company would focus on "the challenge of ageing and associated
diseases".[77]

Entrance of building where Google and its subsidiary Deep Mind are located at 6 Pancras Square, London
On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a
privately held artificial intelligence company from London.[78] Technology news
website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million though it was not
disclosed where the information came from. A Google spokesman would not comment of the
price.[79][80] The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in the artificial intelligence and
robotics community.[81]
According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most
valuable brand in the world (behind Apple Inc.) in 2013,[82] 2014,[83] 2015,[84] and 2016, with a valuation
of $133 billion.[85]
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as
a conglomerate called Alphabet. Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, and will continue to
be the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the
restructure, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became CEO of
Alphabet.[86][87][88]
As of October 2016, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries.[89] Alexa, a company that
monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the world.[14] Several
other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited websites, including YouTube[90] and
Blogger.[91]
On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout
the company which argued that "Google's ideological echo chamber" and bias clouded their thinking
about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that
cause the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions.[92] Google CEO
Sundar Pichai accused Damore in violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender
stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day.[93][94][95] New York
Times columnist David Brooks argued Pichai had mishandled the case, and called for his
resignation.[96][97]
On October 25, 2018, The New York Times published the exposé, "How Google Protected Andy
Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have
been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct.[98] On November 1, 2018, more than
20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company's
handling of sexual harassment complaints.[99][100]
On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud
gaming platform called Google Stadia.[101]
On June 3, 2019, the United States Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google
for antitrust violations.[102]

Products and services

Main article: List of Google products

Search engine
Main articles: Google Search and Google Images
Google Search homepage as of 30 April 2019

Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through
the use of keywords and operators.[103] According to comScore market research from November
2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market
share of 65.6%.[104] In May 2017, Google enabled a new "Personal" tab in Google Search, letting
users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including email messages
from Gmail and photos from Google Photos.[105][106]
Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news
articles from various websites.[107] Google also hosts Google Books, a service which searches the
text found in books in its database and shows limited previews or and the full book where allowed.[108]

Advertising

Google on ad-tech London, 2010

As per its 2017 Annual report, Google generates most of its revenues from advertising. This includes
sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on google and YouTube, android and
licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. 46% of this was from
clicks (cost per clicks), amounting to US$109,652 million in 2017. This includes three principal
methods, namely AdMob, AdSense (such as AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, etc.) and
DoubleClick AdExchange.[109]
For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only
$112 million in licensing and other revenues.[110] In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from
its advertising programs.[111] In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests,
Google uses technology from the company DoubleClick, to project user interest and target
advertising to the search context and the user history.[112][113]
In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile
advertising market.[114]
Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for
example by examining click rates for all the links on a page.[115] Google advertisements can be
placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google Ads allows advertisers to display their
advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme.[116] The sister
service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website
and earn money every time ads are clicked.[117] One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility
of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on advertisements without
being interested in the product, causing the advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry
reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or
invalid.[118] Google Search Console (rebranded from Google Webmaster Tools in May 2015)
allows webmasters to check the sitemap, crawl rate, and for security issues of their websites, as well
as optimize their website's visibility.

Consumer services
Web-based services
Google offers Gmail for email,[119] Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling,[120] Google
Maps for mapping, navigation and satellite imagery,[121] Google Drive for cloud storage of
files,[122] Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for productivity,[122] Google Photos for photo storage and
sharing,[123] Google Keep for note-taking,[124] Google Translate for language
translation,[125] YouTube for video viewing and sharing,[126] Google My Business for managing public
business information,[127] and Duo for social interaction.[128] In March 2019, Google unveiled a cloud
gaming service named Stadia.[101]
Software
Google develops the Android mobile operating system,[129] as well as
its smartwatch,[130] television,[131] car,[132] and Internet of things-enabled smart devices variations.[133]
It also develops the Google Chrome web browser,[134] and Chrome OS, an operating system based
on Chrome.[135]
Hardware
Google Pixel smartphones on display in a store

In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand,
"Nexus".[136] It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the "Nexus" branding[137] until its
eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called Pixel.[138]
In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, described as a "new kind of computer" running Chrome
OS.[139]
In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, that allows users to stream content from
their smartphones to televisions.[140][141]
In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets user place
their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality (VR) media.[142][143]

 The Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones with the Google Assistant, a next-generation contextual
voice assistant, built-in.[144]
 Google Home, an Amazon Echo-like voice assistant placed in the house that can answer voice
queries, play music, find information from apps (calendar, weather etc.), and control third-party
smart home appliances (users can tell it to turn on the lights, for example). The Google Home
line also includes variants such as the Google Home Hub, Google Home Mini, and Google
Home Max[145]
 Daydream View virtual reality headset that lets Android users with compatible Daydream-ready
smartphones put their phones in the headset and enjoy VR content.[146]
 Google Wifi, a connected set of Wi-Fi routers to simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi.[147]
Enterprise services
Main articles: G Suite and Google Cloud Platform
G Suite is a monthly subscription offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a
collection of Google's services, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs, Google
Sheets and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names, and 24/7
support.[148]
On September 24, 2012,[149] Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-
profit business incubator providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with
assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and
mentorships.[150] Presently, there are 7 Campus locations in Berlin, London, Madrid, Seoul, São
Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw.
On March 15, 2016, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 360 Suite, "a set of
integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-
class marketers" which can be integrated with BigQuery on the Google Cloud Platform. Among other
things, the suite is designed to help "enterprise class marketers" "see the complete customer
journey", generate "useful insights", and "deliver engaging experiences to the right people".[151] Jack
Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud
offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM.[152]

Internet services
In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an
ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American
cities.[153][154] Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company,
Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division.[155][156]
In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi
and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless
connectivity and fast Internet signal.[157][158][159]
In September 2016, Google began its Google Station initiative, a project for public Wi-Fi at railway
stations in India. Caesar Sengupta, VP for Google's next billion users, told The Verge that 15,000
people get online for the first time thanks to Google Station and that 3.5 million people use the
service every month. The expansion meant that Google was looking for partners around the world to
further develop the initiative, which promised "high-quality, secure, easily accessible Wi-Fi".[160] By
December, Google Station had been deployed at 100 railway stations,[161] and in February, Google
announced its intention to expand beyond railway stations, with a plan to bring citywide Wi-Fi
to Pune.[162][163]

Other products
In May 2011, Google announced Google Wallet, a mobile application for wireless payments.[164]
In 2013, Google launched Google Shopping Express, a delivery service initially available only in San
Francisco and Silicon Valley.[165]

Corporate affairs
Finance
Further information: Corporation tax in the Republic of Ireland § Multinational tax schemes,
and Google tax
Then-CEO, now Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt with cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (left to right) in
2008.

Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered
19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[57][58] The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market
capitalization of more than $23 billion.[61] The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting
$350 for the first time on October 31, 2007,[166] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in
the online advertising market.[167] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors,
as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[167] GOOG shares split into GOOG class
C shares and GOOGL class A shares.[168] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange
under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker
symbol GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, since
the fourth quarter of 2015.[169]
The corporation's consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2013 was reported in mid-October
2013 as $14.89 billion, a 12 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.[170] Google's Internet
business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks
on advertisements.[171] By