Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software.[7] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.
Google was founded 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 interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. When this restructuring took place on October 2, 2015, Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers online productivity software (Google Docs) including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing (Google Chrome), organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and instant messaging and video chat (Hangouts). The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS[16] for a class of netbooks known as Chromebooks and desktop PCs known as Chromeboxes. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware, partnering with major electronics manufacturers[17] in the production of its "high-quality low-cost"Nexus devices In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.
Google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007).[21] It processes over one billion search requests[22] and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009). In December 2013, Alexa listed Google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger.
Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".In October 2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right thing".[31] Google's commitment to such robust idealism has been increasingly been called into doubt due to a number of actions and behaviours which appear to contradict this
Google's original homepage had a simple design because the company founders were not experienced in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages
Google's first production server. Google's production servers continue to be built with inexpensive hardware
Sundar Pichai
Googleplex corporate headquarters in 2014
Google was founded 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 interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. When this restructuring took place on October 2, 2015, Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers online productivity software (Google Docs) including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing (Google Chrome), organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and instant messaging and video chat (Hangouts). The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS[16] for a class of netbooks known as Chromebooks and desktop PCs known as Chromeboxes. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware, partnering with major electronics manufacturers[17] in the production of its "high-quality low-cost"Nexus devices In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.
Google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007).[21] It processes over one billion search requests[22] and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009). In December 2013, Alexa listed Google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger.
Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".In October 2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right thing".[31] Google's commitment to such robust idealism has been increasingly been called into doubt due to a number of actions and behaviours which appear to contradict this
History
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 Stanford, California.
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[36] They called this new technology 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 and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[39][40][41] Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",[42][43] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.[44] Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[36] They called this new technology 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 and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[39][40][41] Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",[42][43] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.[44] Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[47] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.
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).[50] In January 2013, Google announced it had earned US$50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time the company had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion.[51]
The company has reported fourth quarter (Dec 2014) Earnings Per Share (EPS) of $6.88 – $0.20 under projections. Revenue came in at $14.5 billion (16.9% growth year over year), also under expectations by $110 million.
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).[50] In January 2013, Google announced it had earned US$50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time the company had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion.[51]
The company has reported fourth quarter (Dec 2014) Earnings Per Share (EPS) of $6.88 – $0.20 under projections. Revenue came in at $14.5 billion (16.9% growth year over year), also under expectations by $110 million.
Financing, 1998 and initial public offering, 2004
The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was incorporated.[54] Early in 1999, while graduate students, Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much time and distracting their academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, after he negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced,[55] with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[54]
Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024.[56] The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[57][58] Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[59][60] The sale of $1.67 bn (billion) gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23bn.[61] By January 2014, its market capitalization had grown to $397bn.[62] The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.[63]
There were concerns that Google's IPO would lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires.[64] As a reply to this concern, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture.[65] In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[66][67][68][69][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.[70] Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.[71][72] 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.[73]
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007,[74] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market.[75] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[75] GOOG shares split into GOOG Class C shares and GOOGL class A shares.[76] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.
Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024.[56] The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[57][58] Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[59][60] The sale of $1.67 bn (billion) gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23bn.[61] By January 2014, its market capitalization had grown to $397bn.[62] The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.[63]
There were concerns that Google's IPO would lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires.[64] As a reply to this concern, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture.[65] In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[66][67][68][69][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.[70] Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.[71][72] 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.[73]
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007,[74] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market.[75] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[75] GOOG shares split into GOOG Class C shares and GOOGL class A shares.[76] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.
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