Google

Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational technology corporation focused on information technology, online advertising, search engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has been described as a Big Tech company.

Google was founded in 1998 by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google in 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. In 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.

After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as "Google"), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email (Gmail), navigation and mapping (Waze, Maps, and Earth), cloud computing (Cloud), web navigation (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android and ChromeOS), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photos), videotelephony (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Pixel Watch and Fitbit), music streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand (YouTube TV), AI (Gemini), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI chips (TPU), and more. Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. Discontinued Google products include gaming (Stadia), Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail. Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow, Google Quantum AI), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind).

Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide. Google is the largest provider of search engines, mapping and navigation applications, email services, office suites, online video platforms, photo and cloud storage, mobile operating systems, web browsers, machine learning frameworks, and AI virtual assistants in the world as measured by market share. Google was ranked the second most valuable brand by Forbes as of January 2022, and fourth by Interbrand as of February 2022. The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.

Search

In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi. Google's focus on search differentiated it from competitors like AOL and Yahoo which focused on creating portals and maximizing the time users spent in their walled garden.

In 2003 google entered into common language as a verb, and it was defined in Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary as: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet".

Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Google Search began presenting AI Overviews in 2024.

News publishers have argued that Google should have to pay for its use of their content. In 2026 Australia created a law to force Google and other technology companies to pay Australian news sources.

Advertising

In 2025, Google generated 73% of its revenues from advertising. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense, and DoubleClick AdExchange.

Google Adwords was introduced in October 2000, it originally only allowed advertisers to display text ads on searches of their choosing. Google charged per thousand ad-views which was similar to how existing advertising markets functioned. This was Google's only advertising stream through 2001. Brin and Page had originally opposed any advertising but as years went by without profit they became more open to opportunities for revenue. Page and Brin insisted that all advertising be relevant to the keywords, and only allowed ads to appear in 15 percent of all searches, which meant that Google was forgoing advertising dollars and placing more restriction of advertisers than they were used to.

In February 2002, AdWords was augmented with a cost per click model. This was a significant change in advertising models because it rewarded advertisers for making their adds relevant as measured by the click frequency on search terms selected by the advertiser. The prices were set by a Vickrey auction and ads had a syndicated display on many websites rather than websites selected by the advertisers.

In 2003, AdSense began as a way for Google and third party websites to make money. Keywords from search, emails, and websites were aggregated to select ads for display on the websites. Then the website and Google split the fee from the advertisers.

In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.

Corporate affairs Founding

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with additional contribution from Scott Hassan. Page and Brin published their research, along with Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd, as the PageRank algorithm and Stanford owned the patent. PageRank determines a website's relevance by the 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 would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written 10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to search a large number of websites.

Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. Page and Brin initially approached the nearby David Cheriton for advice. Cheriton had recently sold Granite Systems, the company he co-founded with Andy Bechtolsheim, to Cisco for $220 million. Cheriton arranged a meeting at his home in Palo Alto with Page, Brin, and Bechtolsheim. After a brief meeting which included a demo of the website Cheriton and Bechtolsheim agreed to fund Page and Brin's company approximately $200,000 investment each.

Google received money from two other angel investors in 1998, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram. 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. Bezos asked Shriram to meet Google's founders and they met six months after Shriram had made his investment. Between these initial investors, friends, and family, Google raised approximately $1,000,000, to fund their original shop in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

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 firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

Hiring of Eric Schmidt

In 2001, Google's investors felt the need to have strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google. Schmidt was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted someone with a similar vision and engineering aptitude. Some investors and employees believed that Brin and Page did not want to bring in an outside CEO. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even threatened to demand that Google repay Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive officer, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Schmidt 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 via an initial public offering. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the five-letter ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.

Google has a dual-class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page and Brin believed that the share structure and not publishing quarterly guidance would support a focus on the long term.

Acquisitions

Google's advertising revenue was challenged in 2006 when some advertisers declined to purchase display ads. The company leadership was split on how to handle trade-offs between privacy and advertising value. DoubleClick was known in the industry for the value its cookies brought to the advertising market. In 2007, Google agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion and completed the acquisition on March 11, 2008. After the acquisition, Google was convinced to support advertisers tracking preferences.

In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. 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 and Microsoft, and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.

In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million. While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service.

Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official public statement, Page explained that the "health and well-being" company would focus on "the challenge of ageing and associated diseases".

On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the price. In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go.