Google

This article is about the Internet company. For the number, see Googol. For the search engine, see Google Search.

Google

The Google logo used since 2016
Google's headquarters, the Googleplex
Formerly	Google Inc. (1998–2017)
Company type	Subsidiary (LLC)
Industry	Advertising Cloud computing Computer software Computer hardware Internet
Founded	1995 (first prototype) 1997 (second prototype) September 4, 1998; 26 years ago (1998-09-04) (final launch)[a] in Menlo Park, California, U.S.
Founders	Larry Page Sergey Brin
Headquarters	1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California , U.S.A
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Sundar Pichai (CEO) Ruth Porat (CFO)
Products	List of Google products
Number of employees	114,096 (Q3 2019^[update])
Parent	Independent (1997-2016) Alphabet Inc. (2016–present)
Website	google.com
Footnotes / references [5][6][7][8]

Google is an American multinational corporation from the United States. known for creating and running one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web, also known as the (WWW). Every day more than a billion people use it. Google's headquarters (known as the "Googleplex") is in Mountain View, California, part of Silicon Valley. The motto of Google is "Do the right thing".

Since June 1, 2016, Google has been owned by a holding company called Alphabet Inc.. That company has taken over some of Google's other projects, such as its driverless cars. It is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL.

Google's search engine can find pictures, videos, news, Usenet newsgroups, and things to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web pages on its database, 880 million pictures and 845 million Usenet messages—six billion things.^[9] Google's American website has an Alexa rank of 1, meaning it is the most widely visited website in the world. It is so widely known that people sometimes use the word "google" as a verb that means "to search for something on Google". Because more than half of people on the web use it, "google" has also been used to mean "to search the web". Most importantly, Google created the Google Gnome Game in June of 2010.^[10]

History

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, USA, started BackRub in early 1996. They made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998, at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California, and then later moved to Googleplex.^[11][12]

In September 2001, Google's rating system (PageRank, for saying which information is more helpful) got a U.S. Patent. The patent was to Stanford University, with Lawrence (Larry) Page as the inventor (the person who first had the idea).

Google makes a percentage of its money through America Online and InterActiveCorp. It has a special group known as the Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps make contracts, helps to make accounts better and gives engineering help.

Advertising

Google makes money by advertising. People or companies who want people to buy their product, service, or ideas give Google money, and Google shows an advertisement to people Google thinks will click on the advertisement. Google only gets money when people click on the link, so it tries to know as much about people as possible to only show the advertisement to the "right people". It does this with Google Analytics, which sends data back to Google whenever someone visits a website. From this and other data, Google makes a profile about the person and then uses this profile to figure out which advertisements to show.

Branding

The name "Google" is a play of the word googol.^[13][14] Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this word in 1937, for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes (10¹⁰⁰). Google uses this word because the company wants to make lots of stuff on the Web easy to find and use. Andy Bechtolsheim thought of the name.

The name for Google's main office, the "Googleplex," is a play on a different, even bigger number, the "googolplex", which is 1 followed by one googol of zeroes 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰.

Products

• Android is an operating system for mobile devices and was originally made by Google as part of the Open Handset Alliance, which Google leads. It is the chief competitor to Apple's iOS and Windows Phone by Microsoft (now discontinued).
• Google Adsense is a free program that enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads and earn money.
• Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives one rich insights into his website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
• Google Alerts Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on one's choice of query or topic.
• Google Allo was software for discussing with other people live.
• Google Assistant is a virtual assistant application built into Android devices.
• Blogger is a free tool that allows users to publish blogs on a Google website.
• Google Books lets people search for books.
• Google Calendar is an online calendar.
• Google Chrome is a web browser that Google made.
• Google Classroom is an online system for students. It was popular during COVID-19.
• Google Docs is an online document editor.
• Google Drive is an online file storing service.
• Google Earth is the 3D version of Google Maps with a digital globe.
• Google Groups is a place for users to discuss topics. Google bought Deja News in 2001 and made it into Google Groups.^[15]
• Google Images is an image search utility.
• Google Maps is a service from Google to provide satellite pictures and road maps for everywhere around the world.
• Google News is a facility which shows news stories from over 4,500 news sources. Google News Archives
• Google Pay is a way to pay online. Users can send money using their credit cards or bank accounts to other users.
• Google Photos is a software for organizing and editing photos.
• Google Play^[16] is a sector that has games, and other things.
• Google Products is a pack of Google software.
• Google Search is a search utility.
• Google Shopping lets the user find out about things for sale on the Internet.
• Google Translate is an online translation service. It can translate websites and text into other languages.
• Google Sites is a service for making websites.
• Google Video is a video search utility.
• Google+ was a social networking service that is like Facebook. The service launched on June 28, 2011.
• Gmail is an e-mail service that Google started in 2004. It is called Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany. Users get free space to store e-mail.
• Hangouts is an instant messenger where one can talk to friends. It ended up shutting down on November 1, 2021.
• Sidewalk Labs^[17]
• Tenor is a search utility for GIF files^[18]
• Waze is a navigation service that gives driving directions.^[19]
• YouTube is a video hosting service which was bought by Google from PayPal for 1.65 billion dollars and now runs as a Google service.^[20]

References

1. Fitzpatrick, Alex (September 4, 2014). "Google Used to Be the Company That Did 'Nothing But Search'". Time.
2. Telegraph Reporters (September 27, 2019). "When is Google's birthday – and why are people confused?". The Telegraph.
3. Griffin, Andrew (September 27, 2019). "Google birthday: The one big problem with the company's celebratory doodle". The Independent. Archived from the original on January 12, 2021. Retrieved June 1, 2020.
4. Wray, Richard (September 5, 2008). "Happy birthday Google". The Guardian.
5. "Company – Google". January 16, 2015. Archived from the original on January 16, 2015. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
6. Claburn, Thomas (September 24, 2008). "Google Founded By Sergey Brin, Larry Page... And Hubert Chang?!?". InformationWeek. UBM plc. Archived from the original on June 28, 2011. Retrieved January 22, 2017.
7. "Locations — Google Jobs". Archived from the original on September 30, 2013. Retrieved September 27, 2013.
8. "Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter 2018 Results" (PDF) (Press release). Mountain View, California: Alphabet Inc. February 4, 2019. p. 1. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 4, 2019. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2018. [...] Q1 2018 financial highlights[:] The following summarizes our consolidated financial results for the quarters ended December 31, 2017 and 2018 [...]: [...] Number of employees [as of] Three Months Ended December 31, 2018 [is] 98,771[.]
9. Press, Associated (2004-02-18). "Google expands its search engine". the Guardian. Retrieved 2020-07-21.
10. Morris, Seren (2020-05-01). "Popular Google Doodle Games: Launch Garden Gnomes From a Catapult". Newsweek. Retrieved 2024-09-04.
11. Brin, Sergey; Page, Lawrence (1998). "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" (PDF). Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 30 (1–7): 107–117. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.115.5930. doi:10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X. ISSN 0169-7552. S2CID 7587743.
12. Barroso, L.A.; Dean, J.; Holzle, U. (April 29, 2003). "Web search for a planet: the google cluster architecture". IEEE Micro. 23 (2): 22–28. doi:10.1109/mm.2003.1196112. S2CID 15886858. We believe that the best price/performance tradeoff for our applications comes from fashioning a reliable computing infrastructure from clusters of unreliable commodity PCs.
13. Koller, David. "Origin of the name, "Google." Stanford University. January, 2004.
14. "Google revolution", How it Works, no. 37, Imagine Publishing, pp. 40–43, 2012-08-09
15. "Deja News - Fanlore".
16. "Google Play". Retrieved 2018-11-23.
17. Zochodne, Geoff (6 June 2019). "Order of Canada architect, Silicon Valley investor call for rethink of Sidewalk Labs' Toronto waterfront project". Financial Post.
18. "Google acquires Tenor, popular GIF platform that advertisers love". HT Tech. 28 March 2018. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
19. Elias, Jennifer (27 June 2023). "Google cuts jobs at Waze as it continues to merge mapping products". CNBC. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
20. "Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn". BBC. 10 October 2006. Retrieved 11 September 2023.

Notes

1. Google was originally incorporated on September 4, 1998, however, since 2002, the company has celebrated its anniversaries on various days in September, most frequently on September 27.^[1][2][3] The shift in dates reportedly happened to celebrate index-size milestones in tandem with the birthday.^[4]

Other websites

• Corporate homepage
• The search engine
• Google at the Open Directory Project
• Google at CrunchBase