What is Google?
Google (pronounced googol) is an American multinational technology company specializing in online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five tech companies and is often ranked as the most powerful brand in the world due to its market dominance, large data collection, and technological advantage in AI. Google is a publicly traded company whose parent company is Alphabet Inc.
Founded in 1995 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while still undergraduate students at Stanford University, the company initially named itself Backrub before changing to Google in 1998. The name was inspired by the phrase “googol,” a word from a mathematician’s term meaning “a number too large to be described with conventional symbols.”
Today, Google is an enormous global powerhouse offering more than 50 Internet services and products including e-mail, search engine technology, online document creation, mobile phone software, and hardware such as desktop computers, tablets and smartphones. It is also one of the world’s most valuable brands, averaging over $175 billion in revenue annually.
The core of the company’s business is its search engine, which processes trillions of queries per day and returns an estimated 3.5 million results. This is made possible by massive servers (basically multiprocessor personal computers) that are located in 11 data centers around the globe. Each of these data centers contains several hundred thousand servers that run proprietary programs such as Google File System, Bigtable and MapReduce (a distributed database program). These servers are arranged into clusters to increase the speed and efficiency of processing data.
Other popular services include Gmail, which is the world’s most popular e-mail host; Google Calendar, which allows users to store and share their calendars with friends; and Google Maps, which is a service that enables people to get directions from one location to another, find nearby businesses, and more. Google also offers the Android operating system for mobile devices and Chrome OS for desktop computers.
While most of Google’s products and services are very popular, some have been discontinued or relegated to the “Google Graveyard” (along with other manufacturers’ computer-related products). For example, in 2017, Google ended its YouTube Video Editor feature, which let users add enhancements such as filters and music. Other examples of Google products that have been killed or retired include:
