Google

Google LLC ( , ) is an American multinational technology corporation focused on information technology, online advertising, search engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has been described as a Big Tech company. Google was founded in 1998¹ by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its 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 in 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. In 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet. After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as "Google"), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services.…

Google LLC ( , ) is an American multinational technology corporation focused on information technology, online advertising, search engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has been described as a Big Tech company. Google was founded in 1998 by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its 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 in 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. In 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet. After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as "Google"), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email (Gmail), navigation and mapping (Waze, Maps, and Earth), cloud computing (Cloud), web navigation (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android and ChromeOS), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photos), videotelephony (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Pixel Watch and Fitbit), music streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand (YouTube TV), AI (Gemini), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI chips (TPU), and more. Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. Discontinued Google products include gaming (Stadia), Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail . Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow, Google Quantum AI), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind). Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide. Google is the largest provider of search engines, mapping and navigation applications, email services, office suites, online video platforms, photo and cloud storage, mobile operating systems, web browsers, machine learning frameworks, and AI virtual assistants in the world as measured by market share. Google was ranked the second most valuable brand by Forbes as of January 2022, and fourth by Interbrand as of February 2022. The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position. ==Advertising== In 2025, Google generated 73% of its revenues from advertising. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense, and DoubleClick AdExchange. Google Adwords was introduced in October 2000, it originally only allowed advertisers to display text ads on searches of their choosing. Google charged per thousand ad-views which was similar to how existing advertising markets functioned. This was Google's only advertising stream through 2001. Brin and Page had originally opposed any advertising but as years went by without profit they became more open to opportunities for revenue. Page and Brin insisted that all advertising be relevant to the keywords, and only allowed ads to appear in 15 percent of all searches, which meant that Google was forgoing advertising dollars and placing more restriction of advertisers than they were used to. In February 2002, AdWords was augmented with a cost per click model. This was a significant change in advertising models because it rewarded advertisers for making their adds relevant as measured by the click frequency on search terms selected by the advertiser. The prices were set by a Vickrey auction and ads had a syndicated display on many websites rather than websites selected by the advertisers. In 2003, AdSense began as a way for Google and third party websites to make money. Keywords from search, emails, and websites were aggregated to select ads for display on the websites. Then the website and Google split the fee from the advertisers. In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. == Corporate affairs== , the markup language used for designing web pages. |alt=Google's homepage in 1998 Google received money from two other angel investors in 1998, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram. Page and Brin had first approached Shriram, who was a venture capitalist, for funding and counsel, and Shriram invested $250,000 in Google in February 1998. Bezos asked Shriram to meet Google's founders and they met six months after Shriram had made his investment. Between these initial investors, friends, and family, Google raised approximately $1,000,000, to fund their original shop in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee. After some additional small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. (left) with co-founders Sergey Brin (center) and Larry Page (right) in 2008|alt=Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page sitting together In 2001, Google's investors felt the need to have strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google. Schmidt was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted someone with a similar vision and engineering aptitude. Some investors and employees believed that Brin and Page did not want to bring in an outside CEO. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even threatened to demand that Google repay Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive officer, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Schmidt agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his commitment and to provide funds Google needed. , CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 ===Lobbying and political influence=== Google ranked second in corporate lobbying expenditures in 2012 and fifth in 2013. ====United States==== In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project—Project Vivian—to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions. ====Brazil==== On May 1, 2023, Google placed an ad against the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630, an anti-disinformation law that was about to be approved, on its search homepage in Brazil, calling on its users to ask congressional representatives to oppose the legislation. The country's government and judiciary accused the company of undue interference in the congressional debate, saying it could amount to abuse of economic power and ordering the company to change the ad within two hours of notification or face fines of per non-compliance hour. The company then promptly removed the ad. ===Censorship=== According to Ryan Gallagher of The Intercept in August 2018, Google was developing for the People's Republic of China a censored version of its search engine (known as Dragonfly) "that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest". Google was grilled at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. ===Data privacy=== On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to "non-public" Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. The litigation was settled in July 2020 for $7.5 million with a payout to claimants of at least $5 each, with a maximum of $12 each. On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The judgment claimed Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting data to personalize advertising. Google issued a statement saying it was "deeply committed" to transparency and was "studying the decision" before determining its response. In November 2019, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services began investigation into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the "mass collection of individuals' medical records" complied with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. The DeGoogle grassroots campaign continues to grow as privacy activists highlight information about Google products, and the associated incursion on personal privacy rights by the company. In early June 2020, a $5 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Google by a group of consumers, alleging that Chrome's Incognito browsing mode still collects their user history. The lawsuit became known in March 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case, ruling that they must face the group's charges. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. In April 2024, it was announced that Google agreed to settle this lawsuit. Under the terms of the settlement Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately. On January 6, 2022, France's data privacy regulatory body CNIL fined Alphabet's Google 150 million euros (US$169 million) for not allowing its Internet users an easy refusal of cookies along with Facebook. In August 2024, Google sent an email to users informing them of its legal obligation to disclose certain confidential information to U.S. government authorities. The company stated that when it receives valid requests from government agencies to produce documents without redacting confidential customer information, it may produce such documents even if they are confidential to users; however, it will request confidential treatment of such information from the government. In January 2025, U.S. federal judge Richard Seeborg rejected Google's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit claims Google collected data from users who had specifically opted out of tracking. In September 2025, a federal jury decided that Google must pay $425 million. Google said it would appeal the decision. ====U.S. government contracts==== Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA's massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google. According to unnamed sources, Google joined the PRISM program in 2009. Google has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) on drone software through the 2017 Project Maven that could be used to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon. Google ultimately decided not to renew this DoD contract, which was set to expire in 2019. In 2022 Google shared a $9 billion contract from the Pentagon for cloud computing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. ==See also== Google Blogger – American online content management system Tensor Processing Unit Marcum, Deanna, and Roger C. Schonfeld. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization (Princeton University Press, 2023) online book review Yeo, ShinJoung (2023). Behind the Search Box: Google and the Global Internet Industry. U of Illinois Press. . .

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378514468 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.