Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services

and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software,
and hardware.[6] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that
places advertising near the list of search results.[7][8]
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford
University, California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of
the stockholder voting power throughsupervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately
held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004,
and Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed
the Googleplex.[9]
In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interests as a holding
company called Alphabet Inc. When this restructuring took place on October 2, 2015, Google
became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.[10][11][12][13][14]
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, Sheets and Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling and time management
(Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant messaging
and video chat (Google Allo/Duo/Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and
turn-by-turn navigation (Google Maps), video-sharing (YouTube), taking notes (Google Keep),
organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and a web browser (Google Chrome). The company
leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome
OS[15] for a class of netbooksknown as Chromebooks and desktop PCs known as Chromeboxes.
Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics
manufacturers[16] in the production of its Nexus devices,[17] and in October 2016, it launched multiple
hardware products (the Google Pixel, Home, Wifi, and Daydream View),[18][19][20][21] with new hardware
chief Rick Osterloh stating that "a lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring
controlling the end-to-end user experience".[22] In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed
inKansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service,[23] and in 2016, the company launched
the Google Station initiative to make public "high-quality, secure, easily accessible Wi-Fi" around the
world, which had already started, and become a success, in India.[24]
Google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world
(as of 2007).[25] It processes over one billion search requests[26] and about 24 petabytes of usergenerated data each day (as of 2009).[27][28][29][30] In December 2013, Alexa listed Google.com as the
most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one
hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such asYouTube and Blogger.[31]
Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world for 4 consecutive years,[32][33][34] and
has a valuation in 2016 at $133 billion.[35] Google's mission statement from the outset was "to
organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial
slogan was "Don't be evil".[36][37][38] In October 2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate
code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right thing".[39] Google's commitment to such robust idealism
has been increasingly been called into doubt due to a number of actions and behaviours which
appear to contradict this.[40][41]
Contents
[hide]

1History
o 1.1Financing, 1998 and initial public offering, 2004
o 1.2Growth
o 1.32013 onward

 1.3.1Push into hardware

1.4Acquisitions and partnerships
1.4.120002009
1.4.220102012
1.4.320142016
o 1.5Google data centers
o 1.6Alphabet
2Products and services
o 2.1Advertising
o 2.2Search engine
o 2.3Productivity tools
o 2.4Enterprise products
o 2.5Other products
o 2.6APIs
o 2.7Other websites
3Corporate affairs and culture
o 3.1Employees
o 3.2Office locations and headquarters
o 3.3Doodles
o 3.4Easter eggs and April Fools' Day jokes
o 3.5atGoogleTalks
o 3.6CodeF
o 3.7Philanthropy
o 3.8Tax avoidance
o 3.9Environment
o 3.10Lobbying
o 3.11Litigation
4Criticism and controversy
5See also
6References
7Further reading
8External links
o

History
Main article: History of Google

Google's original homepage had a simple design because the company founders were not experienced
in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages.[42]

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.[43]

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms
appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships
between websites.[44] They called this new technology 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.[45][46]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system
checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[47][48][49] Eventually, they changed the name to
Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",[50][51] the number one followed by one
hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large
quantities of information.[52] Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the
domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.[53][54]
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[55] and the company was
incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki[43])
in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first
employee.[43][56][57]
In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time,
an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million).[58] In January 2013, Google announced it had
earned US$50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time the company
had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion.[59]
The company has reported fourth quarter (Dec 2014) Earnings Per Share (EPS) of $6.88 $0.20
under projections. Revenue came in at $14.5 billion (16.9% growth year over year), also under
expectations by $110 million.[60]

Financing, 1998 and initial public offering, 2004

Google's first production server. Google's production servers continue to be built with inexpensive hardware. [61]

The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim,
co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was incorporated.[62] Early in 1999, while
graduate students, Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up
too much time and distracting their academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and
offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of
Excite's venture capitalists, after he negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. On June 7, 1999, a
$25 million round of funding was announced,[63]with major investors including the venture
capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[62]

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.[64] The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[65][66] Shares were sold
in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters
for the deal.[67][68] The sale of $1.67 bn (billion) gave Google a market capitalization of more than
$23bn.[69] By January 2014, its market capitalization had grown to $397bn.[70] The vast majority of the
271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became
instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned
8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.[71]
There were concerns that Google's IPO would lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged
from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company
executives would become instant paper millionaires.[72] As a reply to this concern, co-founders
Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not
change the company's culture.[73] In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began
suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[74][75][76][77][excessive citations] In an effort
to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer, who also
serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop
and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was
founded on: a flat organization with a collaborative environment.[78] Google has also faced allegations
of sexism and ageism from former employees.[79][80] In 2013, a class action against several Silicon
Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained
the recruitment of high-tech employees.[81]
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31,
2007,[82] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in theonline advertising market.[83] The surge
in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors
and mutual funds.[83]GOOG shares split into GOOG Class C shares and GOOGL class A
shares.[84] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbolsGOOGL
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.[85]