What is Google?
Google is a search engine that uses a proprietary algorithm to retrieve and order search results to provide the most relevant sources of information possible. The company’s dominance in this field has caused controversy and concern about its power over the flow of online information. Google is so effective that it has become a verb—when someone searches for something, they are often said to have “Googled” it.
The story of google begins with two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who invented a system in which servers searched the Internet for pages that contained a user’s search query. They incorporated their creation as Google in 1998. Since then, the company has grown into one of the largest tech companies in the world. Today, Google is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
In addition to the Google search engine, the company offers many other products and services, including email (Gmail), maps, social networking, Android mobile devices, and Chrome browsers. It also operates 11 data centers around the world that store huge amounts of information. These centers contain hundreds of thousands of interlinked computers, each containing multiprocessor personal computers and hard drives mounted in specially constructed racks. Google’s data center computers use three proprietary pieces of computer code—Google File System, Bigtable, and MapReduce—to process massive amounts of information and make it accessible to users.
Google’s success has been due in part to its adherence to the principle of doing no evil, a philosophy that is enshrined in the company’s official motto, “Don’t be evil.” Google tries to avoid being perceived as biased or manipulative in any way and works to promote trust with its customers. It has also been praised for its openness and transparency, providing many details about its operations and financials to the public.
Besides its well-known search engine, google is known for a number of hidden features, or Easter eggs, that give users a sense of the company’s quirky personality and humor. A few examples include the ability to search in leet speak, Klingon, or Pig Latin; or to display a Google logo made of Lego blocks. Other fun features include the ability to send a personalized “doodle” of your choice to any Google user and a feature that allows businesses to showcase reviews written by their customers on the business’s Google My Business listing.
While the company has diversified its offerings over the years, the Google search engine remains its most popular product. As of 2014, it handles more than 70 percent of worldwide search requests. The company was founded in 1996 by Stanford University Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin and is now owned by Alphabet Inc., a holding company that includes other well-known brands such as YouTube and DoubleClick. The company’s shares are traded under the symbol GOOG and GOOGL. The company’s name is a play on the word googol, which is an imaginary number represented by 10100. In 2011, the company introduced voice search and semantic search to further expand its capabilities.
