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. It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by 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 on September 4, 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 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.
After the success of its original service, Google Search, the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email, navigation and mapping, cloud computing, web navigation, video sharing, productivity, operating systems, cloud storage, language translation, photo storage, videotelephony, smart home, smartphones, wearable technology, music streaming, video on demand, AI, machine learning APIs, AI chips, and more. Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. Discontinued Google products include gaming, 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, self-driving cars, and transformer models.
Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide, followed by Facebook, Instagram, and ChatGPT. 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. On the list of the most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by Forbes as of January 2022, and is 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.
History
Early years
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States. 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; Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.File:Schmidt-Brin-Page-20080520.jpg|thumb|Then chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 2008|alt=Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page sitting together
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; it determined a website's relevance 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 would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.
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 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 Jeffrey 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 in 1996, with Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.
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, picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. 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 David Cheriton 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 for $220 million. David arranged a meeting with Page and Brin and his Granite co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The meeting was set for 8 a.m. 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 a.m. 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 a $250,000 investment.
File:Google1998.png|thumb|upright=1.15|Google's original homepage had a simplistic design because the company founders had little experience in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages.|alt=Google's homepage in 1998
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. 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 six months after Shriram had made his investment when Bezos and his wife were on 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. 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. Both firms were initially hesitant about investing jointly in Google, as each wanted to retain a larger percentage of control over the company to themselves. Page and Brin insisted on 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 the mediation of earlier angel investors Ron Conway and Shriram who had contacts in the venture companies. In 1998, Page and Brin proposed to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million, but Yahoo refused. A more significant opportunity for Yahoo to acquire Google came in 2002. Terry Semel, Yahoo's then-CEO, offered $3 billion to purchase the company, but Page and Brin reportedly held firm on a $5 billion valuation. After Yahoo refused to raise its offer, the deal fell through, a move that would later be considered a major strategic misstep for Yahoo.
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley 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!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.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. 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 to retain control over the company. Michael Moritz 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 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.
In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol of 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" 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". The first use of the verb on television appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.