What is Google?
Google is a multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search engines, software, and hardware. It is the world’s most popular search engine, processing billions of searches per day.
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Their project, which originally was called Backrub, developed a search algorithm that prioritized Web pages based on how many other webpages linked to them, rather than just their content and keywords. This led to more useful results and quickly boosted the Google search engine’s market share.
The name Google was inspired by the number googol, which is a number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The founders intended the name to reflect their mission “to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.” The Google logo was designed in 1998 by Peter F. Paulson, a graphic design graduate student. It features a colorful, pixelated, block-like logo that has come to represent the company and its unconventional, forward-thinking approach to business and technology.
From its start in a garage, Google has become one of the most influential companies in the tech industry. In addition to its search engine, Google offers a wide variety of other Internet-based products and services, such as email (Gmail), maps and location-based services, cloud computing, mobile phone software, and social networking. It also produces a range of physical products, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart home devices.
In addition to Google Search, the company’s most popular product is probably its Android operating system. The system is the most widely used smartphone platform in the world, and it also powers a wide range of other devices such as tablets, TVs, and portable gaming consoles. Its other products include YouTube, Google Maps, and the Google Chrome browser.
Google also offers a suite of work and productivity tools, which are collectively known as the G Suite. This includes applications such as Google Docs, which offers the functionality of a traditional word processing program; Google Sheets, which has all the capabilities of a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel; and Google Slides, which is similar to PowerPoint. Google also offers an image-recognition service, Google Images; and a social media management tool called Google+.
In 2015, Google reorganized its interests into a holding company named Alphabet Inc. Google’s core internet products—including search, advertising, apps, and maps—remain under the Google brand, while separate ventures such as longevity research firm Calico and home-products developer Nest are now part of Alphabet. Google cofounders Page and Brin remain CEO and president of Alphabet, respectively, while Eric Schmidt has stepped down as executive chairman. Sundar Pichai was appointed as senior vice president of products and engineering at Alphabet in 2018. In 2019, Google reorganized again, this time into a series of holding companies. The new organization retained the Google brand and renamed itself Alphabet Inc. Alphabet’s portfolio now includes more than 50 different products and services, from search to artificial intelligence to e-mail to hardware.
