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American multinational technology company This article is about the company. For the search engine, see Google Search . For other uses, see Google (disambiguation) Google LLC ( ) is an American multinational technology company that focuses on artificial intelligence,[10] search engine, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, and consumer electronics. 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.[11][12][13][14] It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's Internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.[15] The company has since rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services beyond Google Search, many of which hold dominant market positions. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email (Gmail), navigation (Maps), cloud computing (Cloud), web browsing (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photo), video calling (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Fitbit), gaming (Stadia), music streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand (TV), artificial intelligence (Assistant), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI chips (TPU), and more. Discontinued Google products include Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail.[16][17] Google is known for it highly ambitious technological innovations aimed at solving humanity's biggest problems.[18] Some of these innovations include quantum computing (Sycamore), self-driving cars (Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving project), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs), and transformer models (Google Brain).[19] Google and YouTube are the two most visited websites worldwide followed by Facebook and Twitter. 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[20] and fourth by Interbrand.[21] It has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust and abuse of its monopoly position. History Early years Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.[22][23][24] The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company;[25][26] Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.[27][28] 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.[29] They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.[30][31] Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas.[25] Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[22][32][33] Hassan as well as Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project.[34] PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.[35][36] Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a play on the word googol,[22][37][38] a very large number written 10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.[39] [40] Google's original homepage had a simple design because the company founders had little experience in HTML , the markup language used for designing web pages. The domain name www.google.com was registered on September 15, 1997,[41] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of Susan Wojcicki[24] in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[24][42][43] Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim,[22] co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a few weeks prior to September 7, 1998, the day Google was officially incorporated.[44][45] Google received money from three other angel investors in 1998: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.[46] 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.[47] After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999,[46] a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999,[48] with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.[45] Growth In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California,[49] which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.[50] The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine.[51][24] To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based.[52] 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.[53][54] In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.[56] The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[57] By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet".[58][59] The first use of the verb on television appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.[60] Additionally, in 2001 Google's Investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google.[47] Initial public offering On August 19, 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public offering. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024.[61] The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[62][63] Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[64][65] The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[66] On November 13, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock,[67][68][69][70] On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies.[71][72] By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently.[47] In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time.[73][74] In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date.[75][76][77] 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,[78] mainly Apple and Microsoft,[79] and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.[80] 2012 onward