.google is a

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create an ...

top-level domain (TLD) used in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Created in 2014, it is operated by

Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and se ...

, Google's parent company. It is notable as one of the first

gTLDs Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of ...

associated with a specific brand. The company's first usage of the TLD was with com.google, an

April Fools' Day April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is an annual custom on 1 April consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved in these pranks, which may ...

joke website that hosted a horizontally mirrored version of

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

. The domain currently hosts multiple Alphabet Inc. products and services, and plans exist to move other Alphabet properties to .google as well. Google also owns a number of other top-level domains, including .goog (for sites such as and ), .gmail (a Brand TLD relating to its Gmail service), .gle (for shortened URLs such as ''goo.gle'' and ''forms.gle''), .chrome (for sites such a
apps.chrome
and the target server of hosted Chrome Apps such a
calculator.apps.chrome
and .youtube (for sites such a
about.youtube
an
blog.youtube
. The .chrome, .gle, .gmail, .google, and .youtube TLDs have all been included in the

HSTS HSTS may refer to: * Homosexual transsexual, controversial term for trans women who are attracted to men or trans men who are attracted to women * HTTP Strict Transport Security HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a policy mechanism that h ...

preload-list; as a result, popular web browsers will only connect to a webpage in one of those domains using HTTPS.

References

External links

IANA .google WHOIS info
Google Computer-related introductions in 2014 Google {{compu-domain-stub