Google

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This article is about the company. For other uses, see Google (disambiguation).

Google LLC

Google's headquarters, the Googleplex

Formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017)

Type Subsidiary (LLC)

 Artificial intelligence
Industry
 Advertising
 Cloud computing
 Computer software
 Computer hardware
 Internet

Founded September 4, 1998; 24 years ago[a] in Menlo

Park, California, United States

Founders  Larry Page

 Sergey Brin

Headquarters 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,

Mountain View, California
,
U.S.
 Area served Worldwide

Key people  Sundar Pichai (CEO)

Products List of products

Number of 139,995 (2021)

employees

Parent Alphabet Inc.

Website google.com

Footnotes / references
[5][6][7][8]

Then-CEO and former Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (left
to right) in 2008

Google LLC (/ˈɡuːɡ l/ ( listen)) is an American multinational technology

company that focuses on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud
computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial
intelligence,[9] and consumer electronics. It has been referred to as the "most
powerful company in the world"[10] 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] 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.[14]
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,[citation needed] Google+, Reader, Play
Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail.[15][16]
Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics
include quantum computing (Sycamore), self-driving cars (Waymo, formerly the
Google Self-Driving Car Project), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs), and transformer
models (Google Brain).[17]
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[18] and fourth by
Interbrand.[19] It has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy
concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust and abuse of
its monopoly position.

Contents

 1History
o 1.1Early years
o 1.2Growth
o 1.3Initial public offering
o 1.42012 onward
 2Products and services
o 2.1Search engine
o 2.2Advertising
o 2.3Consumer services
 2.3.1Web-based services
 2.3.2Software
 2.3.3Hardware
o 2.4Enterprise services
o 2.5Internet services
 3Corporate affairs
o 3.1Stock price performance and quarterly earnings
o 3.2Tax avoidance strategies
o 3.3Corporate identity
o 3.4Workplace culture
o 3.5Office locations
 3.5.1North America
 3.5.2Latin America
 3.5.3Europe
 3.5.4Asia Pacific
 3.5.5Africa & Middle East
o 3.6Infrastructure
o 3.7Environment
o 3.8Philanthropy
  4Criticism and controversies
o 4.12018
o 4.22019
o 4.32022
o 4.4Anti-trust, privacy, and other litigation
 4.4.1Fines and lawsuits
 4.4.1.1European Union
 4.4.1.2France
 4.4.1.3United States
 4.4.2Private browsing lawsuit
 4.4.3Gender discrimination lawsuit
 4.4.4U.S. government contracts
 5See also
 6Notes
 7References
 8Further reading
 9External links

History
Main articles: History of Google and List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet
See also: Alphabet Inc.
Early years

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

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.[20][21][22] 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;[23][24] Hassan went on to
pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.[25][26]
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.[27] 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.[28][29] Page told his ideas to Hassan,
who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas.[23]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search en