![Schmidt-Brin-Page-20080520](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Schmidt-Brin-Page-20080520.jpg)
Google LLC () is an American
multinational technology company
A technology company (or tech company) is an electronics-based technological company, including, for example, business relating to digital electronics, software, and internet-related services, such as e-commerce services.
Details
According to '' ...
focusing on
search engine technology
A search engine is an information retrieval software program that discovers, crawls, transforms and stores information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries.
A search engine normally consists of four components, that are sear ...
,
online advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
,
cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
,
computer software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...
,
quantum computing
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...
,
e-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manag ...
,
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
, and
consumer electronics
Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic ( analog or digital) equipment intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications and recreation. Usuall ...
. It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and one of the world's
most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the area of artificial intelligence. Its parent company
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
is considered one of the
Big Five American
information technology
Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology syste ...
companies, alongside
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
,
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...
,
Meta
Meta (from the Greek μετά, '' meta'', meaning "after" or "beyond") is a prefix meaning "more comprehensive" or "transcending".
In modern nomenclature, ''meta''- can also serve as a prefix meaning self-referential, as a field of study or end ...
, and
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...
while they were
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...
students at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
in
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. 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
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...
via an
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...
(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
A holding company is a company whose primary business is holding a controlling interest in the securities of other companies. A holding company usually does not produce goods or services itself. Its purpose is to own shares of other companies ...
for Alphabet's Internet properties and interests.
Sundar Pichai
Pichai Sundararajan (born June 10, 1972), better known as Sundar Pichai (), is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google.
Born in Madurai, India, Pichai earned hi ...
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.
The company has since rapidly grown to offer
a multitude of products and services beyond
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 List of most visited websites, most-visi ...
, many of which hold dominant market positions. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email (
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
), navigation (
Waze
Waze (; he, ווייז, label=Hebrew), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to ...
&
Maps
A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes.
Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although ...
), cloud computing (
Cloud
In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...
), web browsing (
Chrome), video sharing (
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
), productivity (
Workspace), operating systems (
Android), cloud storage (
Drive
Drive or The Drive may refer to:
Motoring
* Driving, the act of controlling a vehicle
* Road trip, a journey on roads
Roadways
Roadways called "drives" may include:
* Driveway, a private road for local access to structures, abbreviated "drive"
* ...
), language translation (
Translate
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...
), photo storage (
Photos
A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now create ...
), video calling (
Meet), smart home (
Nest
A nest is a structure built for certain animals to hold eggs or young. Although nests are most closely associated with birds, members of all classes of vertebrates and some invertebrates construct nests. They may be composed of organic materi ...
), smartphones (
Pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the ...
), wearable technology (
Pixel Watch
The Pixel Watch is a Wear OS smartwatch designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line. First previewed in May 2022 during the Google I/O keynote, it features a round dome-shaped display as well as heavy i ...
&
Fitbit), music streaming (
YouTube Music
YouTube Music is a music streaming service developed by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. It provides a tailored interface for the service, oriented towards music streaming, allowing users to browse through songs and music videos on YouTube based ...
), video on demand (
YouTube TV
YouTube TV is an American streaming television service operated by YouTube, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Announced on February 28, 2017, the virtual multichannel video programming distributor offers a selection of live linear channel f ...
), artificial intelligence (
Google Assistant
Google Assistant is a virtual assistant software application developed by Google that is primarily available on mobile and home automation devices. Based on artificial intelligence, Google Assistant can engage in two-way conversations, unlike t ...
), machine learning APIs (
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...
), AI chips (
TPU), and more.
Discontinued Google products include gaming (
Stadia),
Glass
Glass is a non- crystalline, often transparent, amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling (quenchin ...
,
Google+
Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...
,
Reader
A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to:
Computing and technology
* Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader
* Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application
* A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...
,
Play Music
Google Play Music is a discontinued music and podcast streaming service and an online music locker operated by Google as part of its Google Play line of services. The service was announced on May 10, 2011; after a six-month, invitation-only bet ...
,
Nexus
NEXUS is a joint Canada Border Services Agency and U.S. Customs and Border Protection-operated Trusted Traveler and expedited border control program designed for pre-approved, low-risk travelers. Members of the program can avoid waits at border ...
,
Hangouts
Google Hangouts is a discontinued cross-platform instant messaging service developed by Google. It originally was a feature of Google+, becoming a standalone product in 2013, when Google also began integrating features from Google+ Messenger a ...
, and
Inbox by Gmail
Inbox by Gmail was an email service developed by Google. Announced in limited invitation-only basis on October 22, 2014, it was officially released to the public on May 28, 2015. Inbox was shut down by Google on April 2, 2019.
Available on th ...
.
Google's other ventures outside of Internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (
Sycamore
Sycamore is a name which has been applied to several types of trees, but with somewhat similar leaf forms. The name derives from the ancient Greek ' (''sūkomoros'') meaning "fig-mulberry".
Species of trees known as sycamore:
* ''Acer pseudoplata ...
), self-driving cars (
Waymo
Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.
Waymo oper ...
, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project), smart cities (
Sidewalk Labs
Sidewalk Labs is an urban planning and infrastructure subsidiary of Google. Its stated goal is to improve urban infrastructure through technological solutions, and tackle issues such as cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage. ...
), and transformer models (
Google Brain
Google Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combines open-ended machine learning research ...
).
Google and YouTube are the two
most visited websites worldwide followed by
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...
and
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
. Google is also the largest search engine, mapping and navigation application, email provider, office suite, video sharing platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system, web browser, ML framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the world as measured by market share. On the list of most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...
and fourth by Interbrand. It has
received significant criticism involving issues such as
privacy concerns,
tax avoidance
Tax avoidance is the legal usage of the tax regime in a single territory to one's own advantage to reduce the amount of tax that is payable by means that are within the law. A tax shelter is one type of tax avoidance, and tax havens are jurisdi ...
,
censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...
,
search neutrality,
antitrust
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust ...
and abuse of its
monopoly
A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situati ...
position.
History
Early years
![Google page brin](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Google_page_brin.jpg)
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...
when they were both PhD students at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
in
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
.
The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder",
Scott Hassan
Scott Hassan is a computer programmer and entrepreneur who was the main programmer of the original Google Search engine, then known as BackRub. He was research assistant at Stanford University at the time. Hassan left before Google was officially f ...
, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original
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 List of most visited websites, most-visi ...
engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company;
Hassan went on to pursue a career in
robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...
and founded the company
Willow Garage
Willow Garage was a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company was most likely best known for its open source software suite ROS (Robot ...
in 2006.
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. They called this algorithm
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank webpages, web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. A ...
; it determined a website's
relevance
Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sc ...
by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site. Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas.
Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "
BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
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
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intel ...
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
Héctor García-Molina (15 November 1954-25 November 2019) was a Mexican-American computer scientist and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was advisor to Sergey Brin, the found ...
and
Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project.
PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for
RankDex, developed by
Robin Li
Robin Li Yanhong (; born 17 November 1968) is a Chinese software engineer and billionaire internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of the search engine Baidu. As of March 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$8.5 billion.
Li studied inform ...
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
Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the l ...
.
Eventually, they changed the name to ''Google''; the name of the search engine was a play on the word ''
googol
A googol is the large number 10100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ...
,''
a very
large number written 10
100 (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
The domain name
www.google.com
was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of
Susan Wojcicki in
Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south ...
.
Craig Silverstein
Craig Silverstein (born 1972 or 1973) is a software engineer and was the first person employed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, having studied for a PhD alongside them (though he dropped out and never earned his degree) at Stanford Uni ...
, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.
Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from
Andy Bechtolsheim
Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim (born 30 September 1955) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. His net worth ...
,
co-founder of
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
, a few weeks prior to September 7, 1998, the day Google was officially incorporated. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds.
Page and Brin initially approached
David Cheriton
David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the ...
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
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
for $220 million. David arranged a meeting Page and Brin and his Granite co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The meeting was set for 8 AM 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 AM. 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 an $250,000 investment.
Google received money from two other
angel investor
An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownersh ...
s in 1998:
Amazon.com founder
Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ''né'' Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former presi ...
, and entrepreneur
Ram Shriram
Kavitark Ram Shriram (born 1956/57) is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is a founding board member and one of the first investors in Google. He was earlier employed by Amazon, working for Jeff Bezos. Shriram cam ...
.
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 6 months after Shriram had made his investment when Bezos and his wife were in 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.
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
Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south ...
.
After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999,
a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the
venture capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...
firms
Kleiner Perkins
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs ...
and
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total ...
.
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 in 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 mediation of earlier angel investors Ron Conway and Ram Shriram who had contacts in the venture companies.
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was es ...
, which is home to several prominent
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Cou ...
technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine.
To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Mana ...
, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing
Inktomi
Inktomi Corporation was a company that provided software for Internet service providers (ISPs). It was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. Customers included Microsoft, HotBot, Amazon.com, e ...
.
![Google’s First Production Server](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg)
In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...
, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in
Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376.
Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is t ...
.
The complex became known as the
Googleplex
The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.
The original complex, with of office space, is the company's second la ...
, a play on the word
googolplex
A googolplex is the number 10, or equivalently, 10 or 1010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . Written out in ordinary decimal notation, it is 1 fol ...
, the number one followed by a googol zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.
By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "
google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
" to be added to the ''
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
''Webster's Dictionary'' is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by American lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843), as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's n ...
'' and the ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
'', denoted as: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet". The first use of the verb on television appeared in an October 2002 episode of ''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' is an American supernatural fiction, supernatural drama television series created by writer and director Joss Whedon. It is based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film), 1992 film of the same name, also written by W ...
''.
Additionally, in 2001 Google's investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire
Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 20 ...
as the chairman and CEO of Google.
Eric was proposed by
John Doerr
L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the Pre ...
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
Sir Michael Jonathan Moritz (born 12 September 1954) is a Welsh billionaire venture capitalist, philanthropist, author, and former journalist. Moritz works for Sequoia Capital, wrote the first history of Apple Inc., ''The Little Kingdom'', an ...
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 office, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Eric wasn't initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential hadn't yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at
Novell
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare.
Under the lead ...
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.
Initial public offering
On August 19, 2004, Google became a
public company
A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange (l ...
via an
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...
. At that time
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
,
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...
, and
Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 20 ...
agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.
Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...
and
Credit Suisse
Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Headquartered in Zürich, it maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world and is one of the nine global " ...
, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a
market capitalization
Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders.
Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...
of more than $23 billion.
![Eric Schmidt at the 37th G8 Summit in Deauville 037](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Eric_Schmidt_at_the_37th_G8_Summit_in_Deauville_037.jpg)
On November 13, 2006, Google acquired
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
for $1.65 billion in Google stock, On March 11, 2008, Google acquired
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Inc. was an advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to adv ...
for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies.
By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To handle this workload, Google built 11
data centers
A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...
around the world with several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently.
In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time.
In May 2012, Google acquired
Motorola Mobility
Motorola Mobility LLC, marketed as Motorola, is an American consumer electronics manufacturer primarily producing smartphones and other mobile devices running Android OS, Android. It is a subsidiary of the Chinese multinational technology company ...
for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. 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, mainly
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...
and
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
, and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.
2012 onward
In June 2013, Google acquired
Waze
Waze (; he, ווייז, label=Hebrew), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to ...
, a $966 million deal. 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 Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
, Google's own mapping service.
Google announced the launch of a new company, called
Calico
Calico (; in British usage since 1505) is a heavy plain-woven textile made from unbleached, and often not fully processed, cotton. It may also contain unseparated husk parts. The fabric is far coarser than muslin, but less coarse and thick than ...
, on September 19, 2013, to be led by
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
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".
![Google-Deep Mind headquarters in London, 6 Pancras Square](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Google-Deep_Mind_headquarters_in_London%2C_6_Pancras_Square.jpg)
On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire
DeepMind Technologies
DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, after Google's restru ...
, a privately held artificial intelligence company from
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
. Technology news website ''
Recode
''Recode'' (formerly ''Re/code'') is a technology news website that focused on the business of Silicon Valley. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher founded it in January 2014, after they left Dow Jones and the similar website they had previously c ...
'' 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.
The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in the artificial intelligence and robotics community.
According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world (behind
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
) in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion.
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a
conglomerate named
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 became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the
umbrella company
An umbrella company is a company that employs agency contractors who work on temporary contract assignments, usually through a recruitment agency in the United Kingdom. Recruitment agencies prefer to issue contracts to a limited company as the ag ...
for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructuring,
Sundar Pichai
Pichai Sundararajan (born June 10, 1972), better known as Sundar Pichai (), is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google.
Born in Madurai, India, Pichai earned hi ...
became
CEO
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...
of Google, replacing
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
, who became CEO of Alphabet.
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
"Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", commonly referred to as the Google memo, is an internal memo, dated July 2017, by US-based Google engineer James Damore () about Google's culture and diversity policies. The memo and Google's subsequent di ...
" 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. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore in violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day.
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 dragonfly is a flying insect belonging to the infraorder Anisoptera below the order Odonata. About 3,000 extant species of true dragonfly are known. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions. Loss of wetland habitat threate ...
, a censored Chinese search engine, and
Project Maven A military artificial intelligence arms race is a competition or arms race between two or more states to have their military forces equipped with the best artificial intelligence (AI). Since the mid-2010s many analysts have noted the emergence of su ...
, a military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue growth for the company.
On October 25, 2018, ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' published the ''exposé'', "How Google Protected
Andy Rubin
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in ...
, the 'Father of Android'". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct. 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. CEO Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the protests. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists.
On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a
cloud gaming
Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game rem ...
platform called
Google Stadia
Stadia is a cloud gaming service developed and operated by Google. Known in development as Project Stream, the service debuted through a closed beta in October 2018, and publicly launched in November 2019. The service was to compete with Sony' ...
.
On June 3, 2019, the
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...
reported that it would investigate Google for
antitrust
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust ...
violations. 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
Searching or search may refer to:
Computing technology
* Search algorithm, including keyword search
** :Search algorithms
* Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence
* Search engine technology, software for findi ...
and
search advertising In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other pub ...
markets.
In December 2019, former
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
chief operating officer
A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the "C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...
Bill Ready became Google's new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved with
Google Pay.
In April 2020, due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
, 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. Most employees were also working from home due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home
The
2020 Google services outages disrupted Google services: one in August that affected
Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In addi ...
among others, another in November affecting
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
, and a third in December affecting the entire suite of Google applications. All three outages were resolved within hours.
In 2021, the
Alphabet Workers Union
Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, is a trade union of workers employed at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, with a membership of over 800, in a company with 130,000 employees, not including temps, ...
was founded, composed mostly of Google employees.
In January 2021, the
Australian Government
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government i ...
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.
In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for
Ubisoft
Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include '' Assassin's Creed'', ''Far Cry'', '' ...
ports on
Google Stadia
Stadia is a cloud gaming service developed and operated by Google. Known in development as Project Stream, the service debuted through a closed beta in October 2018, and publicly launched in November 2019. The service was to compete with Sony' ...
. Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such as
Ubisoft
Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include '' Assassin's Creed'', ''Far Cry'', '' ...
and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia.
In April 2021, ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' 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.
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.
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.
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.
Products and services
Search engine
Google
indexes
Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities
* Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index''
* The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and
operators
Operator may refer to:
Mathematics
* A symbol indicating a mathematical operation
* Logical operator or logical connective in mathematical logic
* Operator (mathematics), mapping that acts on elements of a space to produce elements of another sp ...
. According to
comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a
market share
Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a ...
of 65.6%.
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
Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun off from Google+, the company's former social network.
As of June 1, 2021, in its free tier, any newly uploaded photo and video c ...
.
Google launched its
Google News
Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Google rel ...
service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
, a service which searches the text found in books in its database and shows limited previews or and the full book where allowed.
Advertising
![Ad-tech London 2010 (2)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Ad-tech_London_2010_%282%29.JPG)
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
AdMob is a mobile advertising subsidiary of Google, originally founded by Omar Hamoui. The name AdMob is a portmanteau for "advertising on mobile". It was incorporated on April 10, 2006 while Hamoui was in business school at Wharton School. The ...
,
AdSense
Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advert ...
(such as AdSense for Content,
AdSense
Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advert ...
for Search, etc.) and
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Inc. was an advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to adv ...
AdExchange.
In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology its acquisition of
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Inc. was an advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to adv ...
, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history.
In 2007, Google launched "
AdSense for Mobile
Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advert ...
", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
As o ...
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. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program.
Google Ads
Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the result ...
allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility of
click fraud
Click, Klick and Klik may refer to:
Airlines
* Click Airways, a UAE airline
* Clickair, a Spanish airline
* MexicanaClick, a Mexican airline
Art, entertainment, and media Fictional characters
* Klick (fictional species), an alien race in the g ...
, 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. 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.
Consumer services
Web-based services
Google offers
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
for email, Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling,
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
for mapping, navigation and satellite imagery,
Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In addi ...
for File hosting service, cloud storage of files,
Google Docs, Google Sheets, Sheets and Google Slides, Slides for productivity,
Google Photos
Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun off from Google+, the company's former social network.
As of June 1, 2021, in its free tier, any newly uploaded photo and video c ...
for photo storage and sharing, Google Keep for note-taking, Google Translate for language translation,
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for managing public business information, and Google Duo, Duo for social interaction. In March 2019, Google unveiled a
cloud gaming
Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game rem ...
service named
Stadia.
A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites.
Some Google services are not web-based. Google Earth, launched in 2005, allowed users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers.
Software
Google develops the
Android mobile operating system, as well as its Wear OS, smartwatch, Android TV, television, Android Auto, car, and Internet of things-enabled Android Things, smart devices variations.
It also develops the Google Chrome web browser, and ChromeOS, an operating system based on Chrome.
Hardware
In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand. It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the "
Nexus
NEXUS is a joint Canada Border Services Agency and U.S. Customs and Border Protection-operated Trusted Traveler and expedited border control program designed for pre-approved, low-risk travelers. Members of the program can avoid waits at border ...
" branding until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called
Pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the ...
.
In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, which runs on ChromeOS.
In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions.
In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality (VR) media.
Other hardware products include:
* Google Nest (smart speakers), 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 (later succeeded by the Nest Audio), the Google Home Mini (later succeeded by the Google Nest (smart speakers)#Nest Mini (second generation), Nest Mini, the Google Home Max, the Google Home Hub (later rebranded as the Nest Hub), and the Nest Hub Max.
* Google Nest Wifi, Nest Wifi (originally Google Wifi), a connected set of Wi-Fi routers to simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi.
Enterprise services
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite until October 2020) is a monthly subscription offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a collection of Google's services, including Gmail,
Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In addi ...
and Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names, and 24/7 support.
On September 24, 2012, Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator providing startups with Coworking, co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships. Presently, there are seven Campus locations: Berlin,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, 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". Jack Marshall of ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe Systems, Adobe, Oracle Corporation, Oracle, Salesforce.com, 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. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division.
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.
Corporate affairs
Stock price performance and quarterly earnings
Google's
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...
(IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.
The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a
market capitalization
Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders.
Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...
of more than $23 billion.
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the
online advertising
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...
market.
The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.
GOOG shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares. 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,
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.
For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues.
In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs.
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."
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. Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. By January 2014, Google's market capitalization had grown to $397 billion.
Tax avoidance strategies
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. This has reportedly sparked a French investigation into Google's transfer pricing practices.
In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its controversial global tax structure and consolidated all of its intellectual property holdings back to the US.
Google Vice-president Matt Brittin testified to the Public Accounts Committee (United Kingdom), 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. In January 2016, Google reached a settlement with the UK to pay £130m in back taxes plus higher taxes in future. In 2017, Google channeled $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda to reduce its tax bill.
In 2013, Google ranked 5th in Lobbying in the United States, lobbying spending, up from 213th in 2003. In 2012, the company ranked 2nd in campaign donations of technology and Internet sections.
Corporate identity
![Google 2013 logo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Google_logo_%282013-2015%29.svg)
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "
googol
A googol is the large number 10100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ...
",
[Hanley, Rachael. "." ''The Stanford Daily.'' February 12, 2003. Retrieved on August 26, 2010.] which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original paper on
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank webpages, web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. A ...
:
"We chose our systems 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, Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary'' and the ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
'' in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." 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 is "Don't be evil". In October 2015, a related motto was adopted in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right thing". 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. 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, Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...
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".
Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google's hoaxes#2000, Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web.
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 optical fiber, fiber-optic cable down their toilet.
Google's services contain Easter egg (media), easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, "Hacker" or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Pirate, and Klingon language, Klingon as language selections for its search engine. 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?"
Workplace culture
![Pride in London 2016 - Google participating in the parade](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Pride_in_London_2016_-_Google_participating_in_the_parade.png)
On ''Fortune (magazine), Fortune'' magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012,
and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index. 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."
Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google.
Google's 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%). Within tech roles, 23.6 percent were women; and 26.7 percent of leadership roles were held by women. In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, .
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." 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
Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Google rel ...
, Orkut, and
AdSense
Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advert ...
originated from these independent endeavors. 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.
In 2005, articles in ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. 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.
Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees. In 2013, a High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, class action against several
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Cou ...
companies, including Google, was filed for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees. 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".
On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced. The coalition is made up of "13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Switzerland."
The group is affiliated with 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.
Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. 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".
Office locations
![Google at 111 Richmond Street West in Toronto (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Google_at_111_Richmond_Street_West_in_Toronto_%28cropped%29.jpg)
Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Mountain View, California is referred to as "the
Googleplex
The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.
The original complex, with of office space, is the company's second la ...
", a play on words on the number
googolplex
A googolplex is the number 10, or equivalently, 10 or 1010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . Written out in ordinary decimal notation, it is 1 fol ...
and the headquarters itself being a ''complex'' of buildings. Internationally, Google has over 78 offices in more than 50 countries.
In 2006, Google moved into about of office space at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. The office was designed and built specially for Google, and houses its largest advertising sales team. In 2010, Google bought the building housing the headquarter, in a deal that valued the property at around $1.9 billion. 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. In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan's Hudson Square neighborhood. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City.
By late 2006, Google established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs. Other office locations in the U.S. include Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco,
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
; Seattle, Washington; Kirkland, Washington; Birmingham, Michigan; Reston, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin.
![Google Headquarters in Ireland Building Sign](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Google_Headquarters_in_Ireland_Building_Sign.jpg)
It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney (birthplace location of
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
) and
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
(part of Android development). In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
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, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden London Borough Council, Camden Council in June 2017. 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.
Google's Global Offices sum a total of 85 Locations worldwide,
with 32 offices in North America, 3 of them in Canada and 29 in United States Territory,
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
being the state with the most Google's offices with 9 in total including the
Googleplex
The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.
The original complex, with of office space, is the company's second la ...
. In the Latin America Region Google counts with 6 offices, in Europe 24 (3 of them in United Kingdom, UK), The Asia-Pacific, Asia Pacific region counts with 18 offices principally in India and China, and the Africa Middle East region counts 5 offices.
North America
Latin America
Europe
Asia Pacific
Africa & Middle East
Infrastructure
Google data centers are located in North America, North and South America, Asia, and Europe. There is no official data on the number of Server (computing), servers in Google data centers; however, research and advisory firm Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. Traditionally, Google relied on parallel computing on commodity hardware like mainstream x86 computers (similar to home PCs) to keep costs per query low.
In 2005, it started developing its own designs, which were only revealed in 2009.
Google built its own private submarine communications cables; the first, named Curie, connects California with Chile and was completed on November 15, 2019. The second fully Google-owned undersea cable, named Dunant, connects the United States with France and is planned to begin operation in 2020. Google's third subsea cable, Equiano, will connect Lisbon, Portugal with Lagos, Nigeria and Cape Town, South Africa. The company's fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York (state), New York, US, Bude, United Kingdom, UK and Bilbao, Spain, and is expected to become operational in 2022.
Environment
In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 MegaWatt, Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs.
The system is the largest rooftop photovoltaic power station constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.
Google has aimed for carbon neutrality in regard to its operations.
Google disclosed in September 2011 that it "continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes", almost 260 million watts or about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. Google said that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels in 2010. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google.
In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The corporation exercised this authorization in September 2013 when it announced it would purchase all the electricity produced by the not-yet-built 240-megawatt Happy Hereford wind farm.
In July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of power for 20 years.
In December 2016, Google announced that—starting in 2017—it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices. The commitment will make Google "the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy".
In November 2017, Google bought 536 megawatts of wind power. The purchase made the firm reach 100% renewable energy. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma. In September 2019, Google's chief executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said.
In September 2020, Google announced it had retroactively offset all of its carbon emissions since the company's foundation in 1998. It also committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. It also said that all its final assembly manufacturing sites will achieve a UL (safety organization), UL 2799 Zero waste#Corporate initiatives, Zero Waste to Landfill certification by 2022 by ensuring that the vast majority of waste from the manufacturing process is recycled instead of ending up in a landfill.
Climate change denial and misinformation
Google donates to politicians who deny climate change, including Jim Inhofe, and sponsors climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites.
Philanthropy
In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion.
The mission of the organization is to create Climate change education, awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004 and Megan Smith has replaced him as director.
In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. In 2011, Google donated 1 million euros to International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International Mathematical Olympiads (2011–2015). In July 2012, Google launched a "Legalize Love" campaign in support of gay rights.
In 2008, Google announced its "project 10
100" which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites. After two years of silence, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a website that intends to make all legal documents public and online.
Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees.
Criticism and controversies
![Google bus protest](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Google_bus_protest.jpg)
Google has had criticism over issues such as Google tax avoidance, aggressive tax avoidance, Criticism of Google#Page rank, search neutrality, Criticism of Google#Copyright issues, copyright,
censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...
of search results and content, and Google privacy, privacy.
Other criticisms are alleged misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of other people's intellectual property, concerns that its Data collection, compilation of data may violate people's Internet privacy, privacy, and the energy consumption of its servers, as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as
monopoly
A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situati ...
, restraint of trade, anti-competitive practices, and patent infringement.
Google formerly complied with Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China, Internet censorship policies of the People's Republic of China, enforced by means of filters colloquially known as "The Great Firewall of China", but Censorship by Google#China, no longer does so. As a result, all Google services except for Chinese Google Maps are blocked from access within mainland China without the aid of virtual private networks, proxy servers, or other similar technologies.
2018
In July 2018, Mozilla program manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. In April 2019, former Mozilla executive Jonathan Nightingale accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging the Firefox browser over the past decade in order to boost adoption of Google Chrome.
In August 2018, The Intercept reported that Google is developing for the People's Republic of China a censored version of its search engine (known as
Dragonfly
A dragonfly is a flying insect belonging to the infraorder Anisoptera below the order Odonata. About 3,000 extant species of true dragonfly are known. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions. Loss of wetland habitat threate ...
) "that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest". However, the project had been withheld due to privacy concerns.
2019
In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online subreddit, community /r/degoogle. The DeGoogle grassroots campaign continues to grow as privacy activists highlight information about Google products, and the associated incursion on personal privacy rights by the company.
In November 2019, the Office for Civil Rights of the United States Department of Health and Human Services began investigation into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the "mass collection of individuals’ medical records" complied with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA. According to ''The Wall Street Journal'', Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension (company), Ascension.
2022
In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project -- ''Project Vivian'' to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions.
Racially-targeted surveillance
Google has aided controversial governments in mass surveillance projects, sharing with police and military the identities of those protesting racial injustice. In 2020, they shared with the FBI information collected from all Android users at a Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle, including those who had Opt-out, opted out of Location-based services, location data collection.
Google is also part of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal in which the technology companies Google and
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
will provide Israel and Israel Defense Forces, its military with
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
, machine learning, and other
cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
services, including building local Server farm, cloud sites that will "keep information within Israel's borders under strict security guidelines."
The contract has been criticized by shareholders as well as their employees over concerns that the project will lead to further abuses of Palestinians, Palestinians' human rights in the context of the ongoing Palestinian territories, illegal occupation and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Ariel Koren, a former marketing manager for Google's educational products and an outspoken critic of the project, wrote that Google "systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google's complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights—to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear," reflecting her view that the ultimatum came in retaliation for her opposition to and organization against the project.
Anti-trust, privacy, and other litigation
Fines and lawsuits
= European Union
=
On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of from the European Union for "promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results."
On July 18, 2018, the European Commissioner for Competition, European Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The abuse of dominant position has been referred to Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On October 9, 2018, Google confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court (European Union), General Court of the European Union.
On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to "non-public"
Google+
Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...
account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. The litigation was settled in July 2020 for $7.5 million with a payout to claimants of at least $5 each, with a maximum of $12 each.
On March 20, 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion) fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to "compete and innovate fairly" in the online advertising market. European Union competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by "imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites" that required them to exclude search results from Google's rivals.
On September 14, 2022, Google lost the appeal over €4.125bn (£3.5bn) fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google's search and web browser apps. Since the initial accusations, Google changed its policy.
= France
=
On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The judgment claimed Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting data to personalize advertising. Google issued a statement saying it was "deeply committed" to transparency and was "studying the decision" before determining its response.
On January 6, 2022, France's data privacy regulatory body CNIL fined Alphabet's Google a 150 million euros (US$169 million) for not allowing its Internet users an easy refusal of HTTP cookie, Cookies along with
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...
.
= United States
=
After U.S. Congressional hearings in July 2020, and a report from the U.S. House of Representatives' Antitrust Subcommittee released in early October the
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...
filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on October 20, 2020, asserting that it has illegally maintained its monopoly position in web search and search advertising. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion-$12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. Later that month, both
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...
and Alphabet agreed to "cooperate and assist one another" in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices.
Private browsing lawsuit
In early June 2020, a $5 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Google by a group of consumers, alleging that
Chrome's Incognito browsing mode still collects their user history. The lawsuit became known in March 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case, ruling that they must face the group's charges. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO
Sundar Pichai
Pichai Sundararajan (born June 10, 1972), better known as Sundar Pichai (), is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google.
Born in Madurai, India, Pichai earned hi ...
sought to keep the users unaware of this issue.
Gender discrimination lawsuit
In 2017, three women sued Google, accusing the company of violating California's Equal Pay Act by underpaying its female employees. The lawsuit cited the wage gap was around $17,000 and that Google locked women into lower career tracks, leading to smaller salaries and bonuses. In June 2022, Google agreed to pay an $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. As a part of the settlement, Google also agreed to hire a third party to analyze its hiring and compensation practices.
U.S. government contracts
Following media reports about PRISM (surveillance program), PRISM, the National Security Agency, NSA's massive electronic Mass surveillance, surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google. According to unnamed sources, Google joined the PRISM program in 2009, as
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
in 2010.
Google has worked with the United States Department of Defense on drone software through the 2017
Project Maven A military artificial intelligence arms race is a competition or arms race between two or more states to have their military forces equipped with the best artificial intelligence (AI). Since the mid-2010s many analysts have noted the emergence of su ...
that could be used to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO
Sundar Pichai
Pichai Sundararajan (born June 10, 1972), better known as Sundar Pichai (), is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google.
Born in Madurai, India, Pichai earned hi ...
to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon. Google ultimately decided not to renew this United States Department of Defense, DoD contract, which was set to expire in 2019.
See also
* Outline of Google
* History of Google
* List of Google products
* Google China
* Google logo
* Googlization
* Google.org
* Google ATAP
* List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet
Notes
References
Further reading
*
*Vaidhyanathan, Siya. 2011.
The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry)'. University of California Press.
External links
*
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