What is Google?
Google is an American technology company that specializes in online search and cloud computing. Its most prominent product is the Google search engine, which processes more than 70 percent of all worldwide online searches. It also offers Internet services, mobile devices, enterprise solutions, smart speakers, virtual reality headsets and artificial intelligence products. Google is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while they were graduate students at Stanford University. They initially named their company Backrub, but later changed it to Google, which is a play on the word googol, a number that represents one followed by 100 zeros. The company went public in 2004 and has since become the world’s most popular search engine.
The Google search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to search and organize web content in order to provide the most relevant sources of information possible. Its success has led to criticism and concerns about its dominance of the flow of online information. Google has become so dominant that it can now be used as a verb, with people who use the search engine frequently being referred to as “Googlers.”
While Google is best known for its search engine and Internet services, the corporation has also developed numerous other popular products and apps. These include the Gmail email service, Google Maps, the Google Chrome browser and the Android mobile operating system. Google also offers several other services for businesses including the AdWords advertising platform and the Google Fiber Internet service.
The company has also experimented with new technologies such as the self-driving car project Waymo and its Glass augmented reality headsets. In addition, it has branched out into the world of social media with its Google+ service.
Many of the services and apps developed by Google are free to use. However, Google does make a significant amount of revenue from its AdWords advertising platform and other commercial products. In order to compete with other tech giants like Facebook, Google has invested in several high-profile acquisitions in recent years.
As the popularity of Google’s various online services has grown, so has the need for the company to expand its infrastructure and data centers. In order to handle the huge amounts of data generated by Google users, the company has built 11 data centers around the globe, each containing several hundred thousand servers (basically multiprocessor personal computers mounted in specially designed racks). The core of Google’s infrastructure is three proprietary pieces of computer code called Google File System, Bigtable and MapReduce, which are used to store and process large data sets. These computer programs are then used to generate higher-level data such as Web pages and maps. In the future, Google plans to build additional data centers and expand its existing ones as needed. In addition, the company continues to develop its technology through a series of research labs.
