Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the five Big Tech companies along with Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.
Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14% of its shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. Google was incorporated in California on September 4, 1998. Google was then rincorporated in Delaware on October 22, 2002. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, mainly composed of Google employees.
In 2004 Google began offering a free Web-based email account to select "beta" testers (a beta product being a product not yet in its final form). The service, known as Gmail, was opened to the general public in 2007 while still officially in its beta stage. One of the main appeals of Gmail was that it gave users en e-mail address that was independent of any particular Internet service provider (ISP), thus making it easier to maintain a permanent address. In addition, the service offered an unprecedented one gigabyte (one billion bytes) of free e-mail storage space, though users were also presented with advertisements based on keywords that the Google search engine found in their messages. Google later expanded the amount of free storage space given to users to seven gigabytes and allowed users to rent additional space. In 2007 the company acquired Postini, an e-mail services firm, for $625 milliom in order to improve Gmail's security, especially in Google's efforts to sign up business. In 2009 Google removed the beta status of Gmail, increasing its appeal to business users.
In 2006, in what many in the induatry considered the opening salvo in a war with Microsoft, Google introduced Google Apps-application software hosted by Google that runs through users Web browsers. The first free programs included Google Calender ( a scheduling program), Google Talk ( an instant messaging program), and Google Page Creator ( a Web-page-creation program). In order to use these free programs, users viewed advertisements and stored their data on Google's equipment. This type of deployment, in which both the dta and the programs are located somewhere on the Internet, is often called cloud computing. In 2008 Google released Chrome, a Web browser with an advanced Javascript engine better suited for running programs within the browser. The following year the company announced plans to develop an open-source operating system, known as Chrome OS. The first devices to use Chrome OS were released in 2011 and were netbooks called Chromebooks. Chrome OS, which runs on top of a Linux kernel, requires fewer system resources than most operating systems because it uses cloud computing. The only software running on a Chrome OS device is the Chrome browser, all other software applications being supplied by Google Apps. In 2012 Chrome surpassed Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to become the most popular Web browser and, as of 2020, has maintained its lead over IE, Microsoft's Edge (IE's replacement), Mozilla Corporation's Firefox, and Apple INc.'s Safari.
Google was late to recognize the popularity and advertising potential of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Its first attempt to create a social network, Google Buzz, started in 2010 and closed less than two years later. Among several problems, the network was limited to users who had Gmail accounts, and it created privacy issues by featuring a default setting that showed a user's profile to anyone. Within a year of its start, the social network service had attracted more than 170 million users. Facebook, by contrast, had taken five years to reach 150 million users.
Google's strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google's popularity in particular. Analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. For example, American newspaper advertising fell from a peak of $64 billion in 2000 to $20.7 billion in 2011, while global online advertising grew from approximately $6 billion in 2000 to more than $72 billion in 2011.
Google.com is the most visited website worldwide. Several other Google-owned websites also are on the list of most popular websites, including Youtube and Blogger. On the list of most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by Forbes and fourth by Interbrand. It has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, antitrust, censorship, and search neutrality.
Google began as a online search firm, but it now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from e-mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers. In addition, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put it in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google's broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high-tech marketplace, along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Despite this myriad of products, its original search tool remains the core of its success. In 2016 Alphabet earned nearly all of its revenue from Google advertising based on user's search requests.
Google generates most of its revenues from advertising. This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and Youtube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. Forty-six percent of this profit was from clicks ( cost per clicks), amounting to US$109,652 million in 2017. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense (such as AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, etc.) and DoubleClick AdExchange.