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 number written 10100 (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]