Google

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This 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 Inc.

Google's logo since 2015

Google's headquarters, the Googleplex, in August 2014

Type Subsidiary

Internet
Industry
Software
Computer hardware

Founded September 4, 1998; 19 years ago in Menlo

Park, California, U.S.[1][2]

Founders Larry Page

Sergey Brin

Headquarters Googleplex, Mountain

View, California, U.S.[3]

Area served Worldwide

 Key people Sundar Pichai (CEO)
Ruth Porat (CFO)

Products List of Google products

Number of 57,100[4] (2015)

employees

Parent Alphabet Inc. (2015present)

Subsidiaries List of subsidiaries

Website google.com

Google Inc. is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-

related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud
computing, software, and hardware. Google was founded in 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 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. In
August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as
a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google, Alphabet's leading subsidiary, will continue to be
the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the
restructure, Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google; he replaced Larry Page, who
became 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, Sheets and
Slides), email(Gmail/Inbox), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud
storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant messaging and video chat
(Google Allo/Duo), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and turn-by-turn
navigation (Google Maps/Waze), video sharing (YouTube), notetaking (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 in October 2016, it released multiple hardware products
(including the Google Pixel smartphone, Home smart speaker, Wifi mesh wireless router,
and Daydream View virtual reality headset). The new hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, stated: "a
lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user
experience". Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier. In February
2010, it announced Google Fiber, a fiber-optic infrastructure that was installed in Kansas City;
in April 2015, it launched Project Fi in the United States, combining Wi-Fi and cellular networks
from different providers; and in 2016, it announced the Google Station initiative to make public
Wi-Fi available around the world, with initial deployment in India.
Alexa, a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited
website in the world. Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited
websites, including YouTube and Blogger. Google is the most valuable brand in the
world,[5] but has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax
 avoidance, antitrust, censorship, and search neutrality. 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". In October 2015, the motto was replaced in the
Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase "Do the right thing".

Contents
[hide]

1History
o 1.1Financing, 1998 and initial public offering, 2004
o 1.2Growth
o 1.32013 onward
o 1.4Acquisitions and partnerships
1.4.120002009
1.4.22010present
o 1.5Google data centers
o 1.6Alphabet
2Products and services
o 2.1Advertising
o 2.2Search engine
o 2.3Enterprise services
o 2.4Consumer services
2.4.1Web-based services
2.4.2Software
2.4.3Hardware
o 2.5Internet services
o 2.6Other products
o 2.7APIs
o 2.8Other websites
3Corporate affairs and culture
o 3.1Employees
o 3.2Office locations and headquarters
3.2.1Mountain View
3.2.2New York City
3.2.3Other U.S. cities
3.2.4International locations
o 3.3Doodles
o 3.4Easter eggs and April Fools' Day jokes
o 3.5Philanthropy
o 3.6Tax avoidance
o 3.7Environment
o 3.8Lobbying
o 3.9Litigation
4Criticism and controversy
5See also
6References
7Further reading
8External links

History
Main article: History of Google

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.[6]

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.[7]
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 among websites.[8] 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.[9][10]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system
checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[11][12][13] Eventually, they changed the
name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word
"googol",[14][15] the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search
engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.[16] Originally, Google ran under
Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.[17][18]
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[19] and the company was
incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki[7])
in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the
first employee.[7][20][21]
Financing, 1998 and initial public offering, 2004

Google's first production server.[22]

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.[23] 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.[24]
After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999,[24] a new $25
million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999,[25] with major investors including
the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[23]
Early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite
CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla,
one of Excite's venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it.[26]
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.[27]
At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[28][29] Shares were
sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse,
underwriters for the deal.[30][31] The sale of $1.67 bn (billion) gave Google a market
capitalization of more than $23bn.[32] By January 2014, its market capitalization had grown to
$397bn.[33] 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 benefitted because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took
place.[34]
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.[35] As a reply to this concern, co-
founders Brin and Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not
change the company's culture.[36] In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources
began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[37][38][39][40][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.[41] Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former
employees.[42][43] 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.[44]
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October
31, 2007,[45] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online
advertisingmarket.[46] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as
opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[46] GOOG shares split into GOOG
Class C shares and GOOGL class A shares.[47] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock
exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock
Exchangeunder the ticker symbol GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc.,
Google's holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.[48]
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California,[49] which is home to
several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.[50] The next year, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition
toward an advertising-funded search engine.[51][7] In order to maintain an uncluttered page
design, advertisements were solely text-based.[52]
This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off
created by Bill Gross.[53][54] When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued
Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents.
Overture Services would later be bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing.
The case was then settled out of court; Google agreed to issue shares of common stock to
Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.[55]
In 2001, Google received a patent for its PageRank mechanism.[56] The patent was officially
assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, after
outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics,
at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.[57] The complex became known as
the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes.
The Googleplex interiors were designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects. Three years later,
Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[58] 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".[59][60]The first use of "Google" as a
verb in pop culture happened on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in 2002.[61]
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.[62] In January 2008, all the data that
passed through Google's MapReduce software component had an aggregated size of
20 petabytes per day.[63][64][65] In 2009, a CNN report about top political searches of 2009 noted
that "more than a billion searches" are being typed into Google on a daily basis.[66] 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).[67]
The year 2012 was the first time that Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue, which
topped the $38 billion that was generated 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."[68]
2013 onward

Screenshot of the Google homepage in 2015

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