What is Google?
Google is the world’s most popular search engine and a fundamental force in the development of the internet as we know it today. It operates in numerous areas including hardware, cloud computing, advertising and software. Its search engine processes over 70% of worldwide online searches, and its name is so ubiquitous that the word ‘google’ has become a verb meaning to use a search engine.
The company was founded in 1995 by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page while they were students at Stanford University, California. They worked from their dormitory rooms to develop a search engine called BackRub. This program ranked websites based on how often the website’s keywords appeared and was the inspiration for Google’s core technology. It was not until 1998 that the company began to take in outside funding, led by Sun cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim. By the end of that year, Google had topped BackRub in popularity and was officially incorporated as Google Inc.
Since then, the company has expanded to a sprawling multinational corporation with offices around the globe. Its headquarters are located in Mountain View, California. Google is a publicly traded company with several classes of shareholders and is the most valuable public company in the world by market capitalization.
The majority of Google’s revenue comes from its advertisement business, which places targeted ads on web pages based on the keywords entered into the search engine. It also has a large research and development team that constantly works to improve the quality of its search engine results and other products.
Its vast empire includes dozens of subsidiary companies and offers an array of services, including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive, Android, and many other popular programs. In addition, the company has a network of data centers that store information on every continent.
Some of the company’s other major projects include Google Glass, a wearable computer that combines augmented reality with the ability to recognize objects and provide relevant information. Other projects include the Google Self-driving car, which is being tested in real-world conditions. The company’s research and development division, Sidewalk Labs, has also been working on a smart city project in Toronto, Canada.
On occasion, Google’s logo on its homepage changes to a special version known as a ‘Google Doodle’. These are pictures, drawings, animations, or interactive games that feature the Google logo and usually celebrate an event, holiday or famous person. Each one links to a string of Google search results related to that subject. Some have interactivity beyond a simple search, such as the Pac-Man version that was produced for the 20th anniversary of the arcade game.
