Google Inc. is a major internet company. Its stated goal is to organize the world’s information and to make that information accessible and useful. Google’s central feature is its search engine , which helps people find specific information among the internet’s millions of websites . Google users can perform a general search, or they can search specifically for news stories, images, maps, or other types of information. Google makes much of its money through the sale of ads that appear alongside its search results.
In addition to its search engine, Google offers a variety of products and services. The company’s Android operating system runs many mobile phones , small computers , and other electronic devices. Google Chrome is a popular web browser , a type of program used to access and interact with websites. Google runs YouTube , a major video-sharing website. Google Maps, an interactive, searchable map service, provides satellite and street-level imagery and gives directions between locations. The company also offers internet-based data storage, office software, email, and social networking services to any user with a Google account.
Google’s origins date to 1995, when founders Larry Page , an American, and Sergey Brin , a Russian-born American, were graduate students in computer science at Stanford University. Page and Brin first created a search engine that they called BackRub, and they ran the business from their dormitory rooms. They further developed the company and later renamed it Google. The name comes from the mathematical term googol (the number written as 1 followed by 100 zeros) and is meant to reflect the vast amount of information on the internet. Google was officially incorporated in 1998. It became a publicly traded company in 2004. Its headquarters—called the Googleplex—are in Mountain View, California. The company has sales and engineering offices throughout the world.
In 2015, Google’s founders reorganized the company, and Google became part of a new holding company called Alphabet Inc. Most of Google’s core products and services remained under the Google brand name. Other business efforts, such as the company’s investment services and the research laboratory Calico, were reorganized into self-contained units within the broader Alphabet company.
In 2009, Google began a project to develop self-driving cars. In 2016, Alphabet spun off (separated) the project into a separate company called Waymo. Waymo cars use sensors and special software to detect other vehicles, people, and objects while navigating the road. Waymo introduced its first fully driverless car in November 2017. However, self-driving cars remain largely experimental.
In 2017, the European Union’s competitive commission fined Google a record $2.8 billion for anticompetitive practices. The commission found that Google had used its search engine to unfairly direct consumers to its own shopping service.
