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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 Subsidiary
type

Traded as NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG

Industry  Internet

 Cloud computing

 Computer software

 Computer hardware

 Artificial intelligence

 Advertising

Founded September 4, 1998; 26 years

ago[a] in Menlo Park, California,
United States

Founders  Larry Page

 Sergey Brin

Headquarte Googleplex,
rs
Mountain View, California

U.S.

Area served Worldwide

Key people  Sundar Pichai (CEO)

 Ruth
Porat (President and CIO
)

 Anat Ashkenazi (CFO)

 Thomas
Kurian (CEO of Google
Cloud)

Products  Android

 Nest

 Pixel

 Search
  Workspace

 Fitbit

 Waze

 Full list

Number of 182,502 (2023)

employees

Parent Alphabet Inc.

Subsidiarie  Adscape
s
 Android

 Cameyo

 Charleston Road
Registry

 DeepMind

 Endoxon

 FeedBurner

 ImageAmerica

 Kaltix

 Nest Labs

 reCAPTCHA

 YouTube

 ZipDash

ASN  15169

Website about.google

Footnotes / references
[5][6][7][8]
 Then Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt (left) with co-
founders Sergey Brin (center) and Larry Page (right) in 2008

Google LLC (/ˈɡuːɡəl/ ⓘ GOO-gəl) is an American-based multinational

corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search
engine technology, cloud computing, computer 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" [10] and is one of the
world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and
technological advantages in the field of AI. [11][12][13] Google's parent
company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the five Big Tech companies,
alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer

scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford
University in California. 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]

The company has since rapidly grown to offer a multitude of

products and services beyond Google Search, many of which hold dominant
market positions. 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), 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. 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 (Sycamore), self-driving cars (Waymo,
formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs),
and transformer models (Google DeepMind).[18]
Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide followed
by Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter). Google is also the largest search
engine, mapping and navigation application, email provider, office suite, online
video platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system, web
browser, machine learning framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the
world as measured by market share.[19] On the list of most valuable brands,
Google is ranked second by Forbes[20] and fourth by Interbrand.[21] It has received
significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax
avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust and abuse of
its monopoly position. On August 5, 2024, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit P. Mehta
ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over Internet search. [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.[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]

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]
[32]
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. [33]

Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub", because
the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. [23][34]
[35]
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.[36] 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.[37][38]

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine
was a misspelling of the word googol,[23][39][40] a very large
100
number written 10 (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search
engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. [41]

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[42]

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.[43][44] 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.[45][46]

Google received money from two other angel investors in

1998: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.[47] 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 Shriram who told Bezos about Google. Bezos asked
Shriram to meet Google's founders and they met six months after Shriram had
made his investment when Bezos and his wife were on a vacation trip to the Bay
Area. Google's initial funding round had already formally closed but Bezos' status
as CEO of Amazon was enough to persuade Page and Brin to extend the round
and accept his investment.[48][49]
Between these initial investors, friends, and family Google raised around
$1,000,000, which is what allowed them to open up their original shop in Menlo
Park, California.[50] Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired
as the first employee.[25][51][52]

After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999,
[47]
a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, [53] with
major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia
Capital.[44] Both firms were initially reticent about investing jointly in Google, as
each wanted to retain a larger percentage of control over the company to
themselves. Larry and Sergey however insisted on taking investments from both.
Both venture companies finally agreed to investing jointly $12.5 million each due
to their belief in Google's great potential and through the mediation of earlier
angel investors Ron Conway and Ram Shriram who had contacts in the venture
companies.[54]

Growth

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California,[55] which is
home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.[56] The next year,
Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against
Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. [57]
[25]
To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-
based.[58] 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.[59][60]

Google's first production server[61]

In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office
complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View,
California.[62] The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the
word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes. Three years
later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[63] 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". [64][65] The first use of the verb on television
appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.[66]

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.[50] Eric was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been
trying to find a CEO that Sergey and Larry would accept for several months, but
they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the
company. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even menaced
requesting Google to immediately pay back Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they
did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive officer, which had been made
verbally during investment negotiations. Eric was not initially enthusiastic about
joining Google either, as the company's full potential had not yet been widely
recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities
at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Eric agreed to buy $1 million
of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his commitment and to provide
funds Google needed.[67]

Initial public offering

On August 19, 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public
offering, listing the company on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker
symbol GOOG. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at
Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. [68] The company offered 19,605,052
shares at a price of $85 per share. [69][70] Shares were sold in an online auction
format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters
for the deal.[71][72] The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of
more than $23 billion.[73]

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011

On November 13, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google
stock,[74][75][76][77] On July 20, 2007, Google bids $4.6 billion for the wireless-
spectrum auction by the FCC.[78] On March 11, 2008, Google
acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable
relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies.
[79][80]
By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To
handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several
thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-
changing workload more efficiently.[50]

In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one
billion for the first time. [81][82] In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for
$12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. [83][84][85] 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,[86] mainly Apple and Microsoft,[87] and to allow it
to continue to freely offer Android.[88]

2012 onwards

In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million.[89] 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. [90] 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". [91]

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.
[92]
Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased
for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google
spokesperson declined to comment on the price. [93][94] The purchase of DeepMind
aids in Google's recent growth in the artificial intelligence and robotics
community.[95] In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program
to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go.

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,[96] 2014,
[97]
2015,[98] and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion. [99]
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests
as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Google became Alphabet's largest
subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon
completion of the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google,
replacing Larry Page, who became CEO of Alphabet.[100][101][102]

Current CEO, Sundar Pichai, with Prime Minister of

India, Narendra Modi

On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a

memo throughout the company that argued bias and "Google's Ideological Echo
Chamber" 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. [103] Google CEO Sundar Pichai
accused Damore of violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender
stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day. [104][105][106]

Between 2018 and 2019, tensions between the company's leadership and its
workers escalated as staff protested company decisions on internal sexual
harassment, Dragonfly, a censored Chinese search engine, and Project Maven, a
military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue
growth for the company. [107][108] 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. [109] 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. [110][111] CEO
Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the protests. [112] Later in 2019,
some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. [108]

On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game
market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia.[113]

On June 3, 2019, the United States Department of Justice reported that it would
investigate Google for antitrust violations.[114] This led to the filing of an antitrust
lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly
position in the search and search advertising markets.[115]

In December 2019, former PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready became
Google's new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved
with Google Pay.[116]
In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-
cutting measures. Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder
of 2020, except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and
pace of investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business
essential marketing and travel. [117] Most employees were also working from home
due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google
announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to
work from home [118]

The 2020 Google services outages disrupted Google services: one in August that
affected Google Drive among others, another in November affecting YouTube,
and a third in December affecting the entire suite of Google applications. All
three outages were resolved within hours. [119][120][121]

In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google
employees.[122]

In January 2021, the Australian Government proposed legislation that would

require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their
content. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine
in Australia.[123]

In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for Ubisoft ports on Google
Stadia.[124] Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers
such as Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia. [125]

In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long
program called "Project Bernanke" that used data from past advertising bids to
gain an advantage over competing for ad services. This was revealed in
documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google
in December.[126]

In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb

Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a
monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. [127]

In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers,
physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously
accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security
numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and
medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from
only certain but not all search queries. It would not remove content that is
"broadly useful", such as news articles, or already part of the public record. [128]

In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California
based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up
Raxium. Raxium is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the
development of micro-optics, monolithic integration, and system integration. [129]
[130]
In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, [131][132] a Go tool for
finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open
source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks.

In early 2023, following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was
falling behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a "code red"
and a "directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a
billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months". [133]

In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data
centers in Ohio. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster,
will power up the company's tools, including AI technology. The said data hub will
add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google's total
investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. [134]

In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court,
as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
[135]
D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit Mehta held that this monopoly was in violation
of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.[136] In September 2024, the EU Court of Justice,
based in Europe, would also find that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this
case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4
billion fine.[137] The EU Court of Justice found that Google's treatment of rival
shopping searches, which the court referred to as "discriminatory", was in
violation of the Digital Markets Act.[137]

In October 2024, Google was fined by Russia with 2.5 decillion dollars for
allegedly blocking pro-Kremlin propaganda. [138]

In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new artificial

intelligence (AI) hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom’s economic
growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. This AI
hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by
advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region’s specific needs and training
local talent.[139]

The partnership between Google and Saudi Arabia includes collaboration with
key stakeholders, such as the Public Investment Fund (PIF), to develop AI
applications that will benefit sectors like healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and
logistics. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an
emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread
cloud adoption.[140]

Products and services

Main article: List of Google products

Search engine

Main articles: Google Search and Google Images

Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information
they desire through the use of keywords and operators.[141] 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%.[142] 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.[143][144]

Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which
summarizes news articles from various websites. [145] 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. [146]

Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as

Froogle in 2002),[147] finance (launched 2006),[148] and flights (launched 2011).[149]

Advertising

Google at ad-tech London, 2010

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. Forty-six percent of this profit 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.[150] In addition to its own algorithms for
understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition
of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search
context and the user history.[151][152] In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for
Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. [153]

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.
[154]
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. [155] The sister service,
Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their
website and earn money every time ads are clicked. [156] 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.[157] 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.

Artificial intelligence

Google had previously used virtual assistants and chatbots, such as Google Bard,
prior to the announcement of Gemini in March 2024. None of them, however, had
been seen as legitimate competitors to ChatGPT, unlike Gemini.[158] An artificial
intelligence training program for Google employees was also introduced in April
2024.[159]

Google has also created the text-to-image model Imagen,[160] and the text-to-
video model Veo.[161]

In 2023, Google released NotebookLM, an online tool for synthesizing documents

using Gemini. In September 2024, it gained attention for its "Audio Overview"
feature, which generates podcast-like summaries of documents. [162][163]

Consumer services

Web-based services

Google offers Gmail for email,[164] Google Calendar for time-management and
scheduling,[165] Google Maps and Google Earth for mapping, navigation
[166] [167]
and satellite imagery, Google Drive for cloud storage of files, Google
Docs, Sheets and Slides for productivity,[167] Google Photos for photo storage and
sharing,[168] Google Keep for note-taking,[169] Google Translate for language
[170] [171]
translation, YouTube for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for
managing public business information, [172] and Duo for social interaction.[173] A job
search product has also existed since before 2017, [174][175][176] Google for Jobs is an
enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career
sites.[177] Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition
satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software
downloaded to their computers.[178]

Software

Google develops the Android mobile operating system,[179] as well as

its smartwatch,[180] television,[181] car,[182] and Internet of things-enabled smart
devices variations.[183] It also develops the Google Chrome web browser,
[184]
and ChromeOS, an operating system based on Chrome. [185]

Hardware
 Google Pixel smartphones on display in a store

In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its
own brand.[186] It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the "Nexus"
branding[187] until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand
called Pixel.[188]

In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, which runs on ChromeOS.[189]

In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to
stream content from their smartphones to televisions. [190][191]

In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer

that lets the user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to
view virtual reality (VR) media.[192]

In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer

which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media.
[193][194]

Other hardware products include:

 Nest, a series of voice assistant smart speakers 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 Nest line includes the original Google
Home[195] (later succeeded by the Nest Audio), the Google Home Mini (later
succeeded by the Nest Mini), the Google Home Max, the Google Home
Hub (later rebranded as the Nest Hub), and the Nest Hub Max.

 Nest Wifi (originally Google Wifi), a connected set of Wi-Fi routers to

simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi. [196]

Enterprise services

Main articles: Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite until October 2020[197]) 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. [198]
On September 24, 2012,[199] 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. [200] Presently, there are seven
Campus locations: 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".[201] Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite
competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies
[202]
including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM.

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. [203][204] Following Google's corporate
restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved
to Alphabet's Access division.[205][206]

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. [207]
[208]

Financial services

In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join
the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was
creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets. [209]

Corporate affairs

Stock price performance and quarterly earnings

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. [69][70] The sale of
$1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[73] The
stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on
October 31, 2007,[210] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online
advertising market.[211] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual
investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[211] GOOG
shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares.[212] 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. [213]

In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely
due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers,
magazines, and television to the Internet. [214][215][216]

For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total
advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. [217] In
2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs. [218]

Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012,
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." [219]

Google'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.[220] Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this
total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. [221] By
January 2014, Google's market capitalization had grown to $397 billion. [222]

Tax avoidance strategies

Further information: Corporation tax in the Republic of Ireland § Multinational tax

schemes, and Google tax

Google uses various tax avoidance strategies. On the list of largest technology
companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its
revenues. Google between 2007 and 2010 saved $3.1 billion in taxes by shuttling
non-U.S. profits through Ireland and the Netherlands and then to Bermuda. Such
techniques lower its non-U.S. tax rate to 2.3 per cent, while normally the
corporate tax rate in, for instance, the UK is 28 per cent. [223] This reportedly
sparked a French investigation into Google's transfer pricing practices in 2012.
[224]

In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its controversial global tax structure and
consolidated all of its intellectual property holdings back to the U.S. [225]

Google Vice-president Matt Brittin testified to the Public Accounts Committee of

the UK House of Commons that his UK sales team made no sales and hence
owed no sales taxes to the UK.[226] In January 2016, Google reached a settlement
with the UK to pay £130m in back taxes plus higher taxes in future. [227] In 2017,
Google channeled $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda to reduce its
tax bill.[228]

In 2013, Google ranked 5th in lobbying spending, up from 213th in 2003. In

2012, the company ranked 2nd in campaign donations of technology and
Internet sections.[229]

Corporate identity
Further information: History of Google § Name, Google (verb), Google
logo, Google Doodle, List of Google April Fools' Day jokes, and List of Google
Easter eggs

Google's logo from 2013 to 2015. The logo was used

with minor changes since 1999.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol",[230][231] which refers

to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin
write in their original paper on PageRank:[36] "We chose our system name,
Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10 100[,] and fits well with
our goal of building very large-scale search engines." Having found its way
increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to
the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in
2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the
Internet."[232][233] Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to organize
the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", [234] and its
unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil".[235] In October 2015, a related motto was
adopted in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right
thing".[236] The original motto was retained in the code of conduct of Google, now
a subsidiary of Alphabet.

The original Google logo was designed by Sergey Brin. [237] Since 1998, Google
has been designing special, temporary alternate logos to place on their
homepage intended to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people. The
first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998.[238][239] The
doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their
absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed
by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis
Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles
have been organized and created by a team of employees termed "Doodlers". [240]

Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on April 1, 2000,
was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to
search the web.[241] In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service
called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection
by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet.[242]

Google's services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork
bork", Pig Latin, "Hacker" or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as
language selections for its search engine. [243] When searching for the word
"anagram", meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form other
valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays "Did you mean: nag a
ram?"[244] Since 2019, Google runs free online courses to help engineers learn
how to plan and author technical documentation better.[245]

Workplace culture
 Google employees marching in the Pride in
London parade in 2016

On Fortune magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first
in 2007, 2008 and 2012, [246][247][248] and fourth in 2009 and 2010. [249][250] Google
was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to
graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index.
[251]
Google's corporate philosophy includes principles such as "you can make
money without doing evil", "you can be serious without a suit", and "work should
be challenging and the challenge should be fun." [252]

As of September 30, 2020, Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, [253] of which
more than 100,000 worked for Google. [8] Google's 2020 diversity report states
that 32 percent of its workforce are women and 68 percent are men, with the
ethnicity of its workforce being predominantly white (51.7%) and Asian (41.9%).
[254]
Within tech roles, 23.6 percent were women; and 26.7 percent of leadership
roles were held by women.[255] In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees,
Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, as of
March 2019.[8]

Google's employees are hired based on a hierarchical system. Employees are

split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range "from entry-level
data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level
six."[256] As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy known as Innovation
Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work
time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's services, such as
Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent
endeavors.[257] In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-
president of Search Products and User Experience until July 2012, showed that
half of all new product launches in the second half of 2005 had originated from
the Innovation Time Off.[258]

In 2005, articles in The New York Times[259] and other sources began suggesting
that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. [260][261][262] In an effort to
maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture
Officer whose purpose was to develop and maintain the culture and work on
ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on.
[263]
Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former
employees.[264][265] 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. [266] In a
lawsuit filed January 8, 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged
Google discriminated against a class defined by their "conservative political
views[,] male gender[,] and/or [...] Caucasian or Asian race". [267]

On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google

employees, Alpha Global, was announced. [268] The coalition is made up of "13
different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United
States, [the] United Kingdom, and Switzerland." [269] The group is affiliated with
the UNI Global Union, which represents nearly 20 million international workers
from various unions and federations. The formation of the union is in response to
persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic
workplace culture.[269][270][267] Google had previously been accused of surveilling
and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. [271] In
2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an
anti-union campaign called Project Vivian to "convince them (employees) that
unions suck".[272]

Office locations

Further information: Googleplex

Google's New York City

office building houses its largest advertising sales team.

Google's To
ronto office
Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California is referred to as
"the Googleplex", a play on words on the number googolplex and the
headquarters itself being a complex of buildings. Internationally, Google has over
78 offices in more than 50 countries.[273]

In 2006, Google moved into about 300,000 square feet (27,900 m2) of office
space at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. The office houses its
largest advertising sales team.[274] In 2010, Google bought the building housing
the headquarter, in a deal that valued the property at around $1.9 billion. [275]
[276]
In March 2018, Google's parent company Alphabet bought the
nearby Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion. The sale is touted as one of the
most expensive real estate transactions for a single building in the history of
New York.[277][278][279][280] In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand
its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. [281] The same
December, it was announced that a $1 billion, 1,700,000-square-foot
(160,000 m2) headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan's Hudson
Square neighborhood.[282][283] Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is
projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New
York City.[284]

By late 2006, Google established a new headquarters for its AdWords division
in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[285] In November 2006, Google opened offices
on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related
advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs.[286][287] Other
office locations in the U.S. include Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Boulder,
Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; Seattle,
Washington; Kirkland, Washington; Birmingham, Michigan; Reston,
[288] [289]
Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin.

Google's Dublin Ireland office, headquarters of

Google Ads for Europe

It also has product research and development operations in cities around the
world, namely Sydney (birthplace location of Google Maps)[290] and London (part
of Android development).[291] In November 2013, Google announced plans for a
new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate
4,500 employees. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property
acquisitions at the time of the deal's announcement in January, [292] Google
submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017.[293]
[294]
In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus
in Hyderabad, India. The new campus, reported to be the company's largest
outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. [295][296]

Google's Global Offices sum a total of 85 Locations worldwide, [297] with 32 offices
in North America, 3 of them in Canada and 29 in United
States Territory, California being the state with the most Google's offices with 9 in
total including the Googleplex. In the Latin America Region Google counts with 6
offices, in Europe 24 (3 of them in UK), the Asia Pacific region counts with 18
offices principally 4 in India and 3 in China, and the Africa Middle East region
counts 5 offices.