What is Google?
Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. Its main product is the search engine, but it also offers other tools such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google Drive. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Google has operations worldwide.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is done by utilizing the proprietary algorithm that powers its search engine. The company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were Ph.D. students at Stanford University when they first partnered to create the search engine backrub in 1995. They incorporated Google on September 4, 1998, with Page and Brin owning about 16 percent of the company’s shares.
The Google search algorithm has evolved over the years to become more sophisticated. In addition to traditional text-based searches, it now enables voice and image searches as well as semantic analysis of the meaning of words. Google’s search results are also influenced by the number and quality of other Web pages that link to a given page. This is known as the PageRank algorithm.
In the early days of the Web, Page and Brin focused on maximizing the number of Web crawls they conducted. As a result, the company’s index of Web pages grew rapidly. This was an important step in establishing Google’s dominance of the Internet search market.
Page and Brin sought outside financing to help them scale their business. They received a check for $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. By mid-1999, the company was processing about 500,000 queries per day. Google’s popularity increased dramatically in 2000 when it became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo!
As the number of people using the Internet exploded, Google’s revenue increased as well. In 2002, the company introduced AdWords, an advertising program that targets specific audiences based on keywords that they enter into a search engine. Today, Google is the most widely used advertising platform in the world and a major source of revenue for the company.
Google has also developed other Internet-related products, including Chrome OS, a mobile operating system for desktop computers; Android, an open-source smartphone operating system; and Google Apps, a cloud-based suite of productivity software. In addition, the company has invested in the self-driving car industry through its subsidiary Waymo and launched Google Fiber, a high-speed fibre optic internet service available to 3.1 million households in the United States. Currently, the company operates data centers in multiple countries. Moreover, the company has thousands of employees worldwide.
