Google LLC[5] is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-

related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine,
cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google was founded in 1998 by Larry
Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.
Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder
voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company
on September 4, 1998. An Initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google
moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In
August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate
called Alphabet Inc. Google, Alphabet's leading subsidiary, will continue to be the umbrella
company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructure, Sundar Pichai was
appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet.
The company's rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions,
and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers services
designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides), email (Gmail/Inbox),
scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social
networking (Google+), instant messaging and video chat (Google Allo/Duo/Hangouts), language
translation (Google Translate), mapping and turn-by-turn navigation (Google
Maps/Waze/Earth/Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google Keep), and photo
organizing and editing (Google Photos). The company leads the development of
the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a
lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. Google has moved increasingly into
hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production
of its Nexus devices, and in October 2016, it released multiple hardware products (including
the Google Pixel smartphone, Home smart speaker, Wifi mesh wireless router, and Daydream
View virtual reality headset). The new hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, stated: "a lot of the
innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience".
Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier. In February 2010, it
announced Google Fiber, a fiber-optic infrastructure that was installed in Kansas City; in April
2015, it launched Project Fi in the United States, combining Wi-Fi and cellular networks from
different providers; and in 2016, it announced the Google Station initiative to make public Wi-Fi
available around the world, with initial deployment in India.
Alexa, a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited
website in the world. Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most vi
. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that
many company executives would become instant paper millionaires.[37] As a reply to this concern,
co-founders Brin and Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not
change the company's culture.[38] In 2005, articles in The New York Times[39] and other sources
began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[40][41][42][excessive citations] In
an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer,
who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is
to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the
company was founded on: a flat organization with a collaborative environment.[43] Google has
also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.[44][45] In 2013, a class action
against several Silicon Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged "no cold call"
agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.[46]
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31,
2007,[47] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertisingmarket.[48] The
surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional
investors and mutual funds.[48] GOOG shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class
A shares.[49] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker
symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchangeunder the ticker symbol
GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, since the
fourth quarter of 2015.[50]
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California,[51] which is home to several
prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.[52] The next year, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition
toward an advertising-funded search engine.[53][9] In order to maintain an uncluttered page design,
advertisements were solely text-based.[54]
This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off
created by Bill Gross.[55][56] When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued
Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture
Services would later be bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was
then settled out of court; Google agreed to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange
for a perpetual license.[57]
In 2001, Google received a patent for its PageRank mechanism.[58] The patent was officially
assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, after
outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.[59] The complex became known as
the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes.
The Googleplex interiors were designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects. Three years later, Google
bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[60] 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".[61][62]The first use of "Google" as a verb in pop
culture happened on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in 2002.[63]
In 2005, The Washington Post reported on a 700 percent increase in third-quarter profit for
Google, largely thanks to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers,
magazines, and television to the Internet.[64] In January 2008, all the data that passed through
Google's MapReduce software component had an aggregated size of 20 petabytes per
day.[65][66][67] In 2009, a CNN report about top political searches of 2009 noted that "more than a
billion searches" are being typed into Google on a daily basis.[68] In May 2011, the number of
monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase
from May 2010 (931 million).[69]
The year 2012 was the first time that Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue, which
topped the $38 billion that was generated 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."[70]

2013 onward

Screenshot of the Google homepage in 2015

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".[71]
Google celebrated its 15-year anniversary on September 27, 2013, and in 2016 it celebrated its
18th birthday with an animated Doodleshown on web browsers around the world.[72] although it
has used other dates for its official birthday.[73] The reason for the choice of September 27
remains unclear, and a dispute with rival search engine Yahoo! Search in 2005 has been
suggested as the cause.[74][75]
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013; Google is part of the
coalition of public and private organizations that also includes Facebook, Intel, and Microsoft.
Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that
access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Google will
help to decrease Internet access prices so they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's
worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.[76]
The corporation'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.[77]Google's
Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of
users' clicks on advertisements.[78]
According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most
valuable brand in the world (behind Apple Inc.) in 2013,[79] 2014,[80] 2015,[81] and 2016, with a
valuation of $133 billion.[82]
In September 2015, Google engineering manager Rachel Potvin revealed details about Google's
software code at an engineering conference. She revealed that the entire Google codebase,
which spans every single service it develops, consists of over 2 billion lines of code. All that code
is stored in a code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers, and the code is regularly
copied and updated on 10 Google data centers. To keep control, Potvin said Google has built its
own "version control system", called "Piper", and that "when you start a new project, you have a
wealth of libraries already available to you. Almost everything has already been done." Engineers
can make a single code change and deploy it on all services at the same time. The only major
exceptions are that the PageRank search results algorithm is stored separately with only specific
employee access, and the code for the Android operating system and the Google Chrome
browser are also stored separately, as they don't run on the Internet. The "Piper" system spans
85 TB of data. Google engineers make 25,000 changes to the code each day and on a weekly
basis change approximately 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files. With that much code,
automated bots have to help. Potvin reported, "You need to make a concerted effort to maintain
code health. And this is not just humans maintaining code health, but robots too.” Bots aren't
writing code, but generating a lot of the data and configuration files needed to run the company's
software. "Not only is the size of the repository increasing," Potvin explained, "but the rate of
change is also increasing. This is an exponential curve."[83][84]
As of October 2016, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries.[85] Alexa, a company
that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the
world.[86] Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited websites, including
YouTube[87] and Blogger.[88]

Acquisitions and partnerships

Main article: List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

2000–2009
In 2001, Google acquired Deja News, the operators of a large archive of materials
from Usenet.[89][90] Google rebranded the archive as Google Groups, and by the end of the year, it
had expanded the history back to 1981.[91][92]
In April 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics, a company specializing in making software
applications for the online advertising space.[93][94] The AdSense contextual advertising technology
developed by Applied Semantics was adopted into Google's advertising efforts.[95][92]
In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole, Inc.[96] Keyhole's eponymous product was later
renamed Google Earth.
In 2005. Google acquired Urchin Software in April 2005, using their Urchin on Demand product
(along with ideas from Adaptive Path's Measure Map) to create Google Analytics in 2006.
In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for
$1.65 billion in Google stock,[97][98] and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[99][100]
On April 13, 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion,
transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and
advertising agencies.[101] The deal was approved despite anti-trust concerns raised by
competitors Microsoft and AT&T.[102]
In addition to the many companies Google has purchased, the firm has partnered with other
organizations for research, advertising, and other activities. In 2005, Google partnered
with NASA Ames Research Center to build 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of offices.[103]
In 2005 Google partnered with AOL[104] to enhance each other's video search services. In 2006
Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corporation entered into a $900 million agreement to
provide search and advertising on the then-popular social networking site MySpace.[105]
In 2007, Google began sponsoring NORAD Tracks Santa, displacing the former sponsor AOL.
NORAD Tracks Santa purports to follow Santa Claus' progress on Christmas Eve,[106]using
Google Earth to "track Santa" in 3-D for the first time.[107] [108]
In 2008, Google developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with
high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was
launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008.[109] Google also announced in
2008 that it was hosting an archive of Life Magazine's photographs.[110][111]
2010–present
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. The farms, which were
developed by NextEra Energy Resources, will reduce fossil fuel use in the region and return
profits. NextEra Energy Resources sold Google a twenty-percent stake in the project to get
funding for its development.[112] In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission FERC granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market
rates.[113] The order specifically states that Google Energy—a subsidiary of Google—holds the
rights "for the sale of energy, capacity, and ancillary services at market-based rates", but
acknowledges that neither Google Energy nor its affiliates "own or control any generation or
transmission" facilities.[114] 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.[115]
Also in 2010, Google purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norway-based company that provides
web-based teleconferencing and other related services. This acquisition enabled Google to add
telephone-style services to its list of products.[116] On May 27, 2010, Google announced it had
also closed the acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob. This occurred days after the Federal
Trade Commission closed its investigation into the purchase.[117] Google acquired the company
for an undisclosed amount.[118] In July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm
to buy 114 megawatts of energy for 20 years.[119]
On April 4, 2011, The Globe and Mail reported that Google bid $900 million for 6000 Nortel
Networks patents.[120]
On August 15, 2011, Google made its largest-ever acquisition to-date when it announced that it
would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion[121][122] subject to approval from regulators in the
United States and Europe. In a post on Google's blog, Google Chief Executive and co-founder
Larry Page revealed that the acquisition was a strategic move to strengthen Google's patent
portfolio. The company's Android operating system has come under fire in an industry-wide
patent battle, as Apple and Microsoft have sued Android device makers such as HTC, Samsung,
and Motorola.[123] The merger was completed on May 22, 2012, after the approval of People's
Republic of China.[124]
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,[125] mainly Apple and Microsoft,[123] and to allow it to continue to freely
offer Android.[126] After the acquisition closed, Google began to restructure the Motorola business
to fit Google's strategy. On August 13, 2012, Google announced plans to lay off 4000 Motorola
Mobility employees.[127] On December 10, 2012, Google sold the manufacturing operations of
Motorola Mobility to Flextronics for $75 million.[128] As a part of the agreement, Flextronics will
manufacture undisclosed Android and other mobile devices.[129] On December 19, 2012, Google
sold the Motorola Home business division of Motorola Mobility to Arris Group for $2.35 billion in a
cash-and-stock transaction. As a part of this deal, Google acquired a 15.7% stake in Arris Group
valued at $300 million.[130][131]
In June 2013, Google acquired Waze, a $966 million deal.[132] 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.[133]
On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a
privately held artificial intelligence company from London. DeepMind describes itself as having
the ability to combine the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to
build general-purpose learning algorithms. DeepMind's first commercial applications were used
in simulations, e-commerce and games. As of December 2013, it was reported that DeepMind
had roughly 75 employees.[134] Technology news website Recode reported that the company was
purchased for $400 million though it was not disclosed where the information came from. A
Google spokesman would not comment of the price.[135][136] The purchase of DeepMind aids in
Google's recent growth in the artificial intelligence and robotics community.[137]
On January 29, 2014, Google announced that it would divest Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for
$2.91 billion, a fraction of the original $12.5 billion price paid by Google to acquire the company.
Google retained all but 2000 of Motorola's patents and entered into cross-licensing deals.[138]
On September 21, 2017, HTC announced a "cooperation agreement" in which it would sell non-
exclusive rights to certain intellectual property, as well as smartphone talent, to Google for $1.1
billion.[139][140][141]

Google data centers

As of 2016, Google owned and operated nine data centers across North and South America, two
in Asia, and four in Europe.[142]
In 2011, the company had announced plans to build three data centers at a cost of more than
$200 million in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and said they would be operational
within two years.[143][144] In December 2013, Google announced that it had scrapped the plan to
build a data center in Hong Kong.[145]
In October 2013, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. National Security
Agency intercepted communications between Google's data centers, as part of a program
named MUSCULAR.[146][147] This wiretapping was made possible because Google did not encrypt
data passed inside its own network.[148] Google began encrypting data sent between data centers
in 2013.[149]
Google's most efficient data center runs at 95 °F (35 °C) using only fresh air cooling, requiring no
electrically powered air conditioning; the servers run so hot that humans cannot go near them for
extended periods.[150]
An August 2011 report estimated that Google had about 900,000 servers in their data centers,
based on energy usage. The report does state that "Google never says how many servers are
running in its data centers."[151]
In December 2016, Google announced that starting in 2017, it will power all of its data centers,
as well as all of its offices, from 100% renewable energy. 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". Google also stated that it does not count that as its
final goal; it says that "since the wind doesn't blow 24 hours a day, we'll also broaden our
purchases to a variety of energy sources that can enable renewable power, every hour of every
day". Additionally, the project will "help support communities" around the world, as the purchase
commitments will "result in infrastructure investments of more than $3.5 billion globally", and will
"generate tens of millions of dollars per year in revenue to local property owners, and tens of
millions more to local and national governments in tax revenue".[152][153][154]

Alphabet
Main article: Alphabet Inc.
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as
a conglomerate called Alphabet. Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, and will continue
to be the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the
restructure, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became CEO of
Alphabet.[155][156][157]
On September 1, 2017, Google Inc. announced its plans of restructuring as a limited liability
company, Google LLC, as a wholly owned subsidiary of XXVI Holdings Inc., which is formed as a
subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. to hold the equity of its other subsidiaries, including Google LLC and
other bets.[158]

Products and services

See also: List of Google products

Advertising

Google on ad-tech London, 2010

For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and
only $112 million in licensing and other revenues.[159] In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was
derived from its advertising programs.[160] In addition to its own algorithms for understanding
search requests, Google uses technology from the company DoubleClick, to project user interest
and target advertising to the search context and the user history.[161][162]
In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile
advertising