What is Google?
Google has become the most famous and profitable search engine on the web, but it also operates many other websites and offers numerous services. Google is a multinational corporation that specializes in online advertising technology and search tools, cloud computing, software and hardware. Its most popular products are the search engine and the online ad platform that places ads near search results. Google has expanded its business to include many other areas, such as social networks and smartphone operating systems.
Google was founded in 1995 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while they were students at Stanford University. They worked out of their dorm rooms to create a search engine that would sort through the growing mass of information on the World Wide Web. Their initial search engine was called Backrub and used links to determine the importance of pages on the web. By 1998, the company had received outside investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems Inc., and was formally incorporated on 4 September that year.
The new Google search engine grew quickly and by 2000 it had surpassed Yahoo! as the most popular Internet search engine. Its name came from a misspelling of the word googol, which is the number 10100 written in binary form (one followed by 100 zeroes). The name has since been shortened to simply Google.
In the years that followed, Google introduced a variety of other services, including Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps. The company’s initial public offering of shares in 2004 made Brin and Page instant billionaires.
More recently, Google has expanded into the field of augmented reality. Its smartphones have a built-in feature that allows them to recognise objects in the real world. Google Lens, a feature that launched in 2017, can identify things by using the phone’s camera to scan them.
While the most popular services are free, most of the Google’s other products generate revenue from advertisements. These are shown as text or graphical advertisements that appear on a user’s screen when they perform a search. Google also makes money by selling its own hardware products and acquiring other companies in the tech industry.
Occasionally, Google’s website will feature a special logo that is designed to celebrate a certain event or day. This is called a Google Doodle and has included drawings, animations and interactive games. It has also celebrated birthdays of notable people, historical events and holidays such as Valentine’s Day. In 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interests under a holding company called Alphabet Inc. Google will remain Alphabet’s leading subsidiary and will continue to operate its most popular services such as the search engine and ad platform. The company is also working on several other projects, such as self-driving cars and virtual reality.
