What is Google?
Google is the world’s most popular online search engine, but it also offers a host of other services and products. Its most well-known offerings include Gmail for emails, Google Maps for directions and satellite images of the planet, and YouTube for video sharing. This multifaceted technology giant is headquartered in Mountain View, California and has thousands of employees worldwide. Google’s name is a play on the mathematical term “googol,” which means 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, chose the name to symbolize their goal of organizing the vast amount of information on the internet.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998 while they were Ph.D students at Stanford University. The company started out as a simple search engine that used an algorithm to rank websites based on their relevance to keywords entered into a search box. Over time, Google became a massively successful enterprise that made its founders extremely rich. By 2004, the company went public and the stock soared, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
In the years that followed, Google continued to grow its search empire and expanded into a number of other areas. It purchased several other companies, including Pyra Labs, the maker of the blogging software Blogger. It also offered a free Web-based email service called Gmail to select “beta” testers, which later grew to become the largest e-mail provider in the world.
Google has also branched out into social media and mobile phone applications. In addition to Google+, a failed attempt at a social network that was later shut down, the company developed Android phones and a mapping application called Google Maps. It has even experimented with self-driving cars, which it operates through a division called Waymo.
The company’s success has earned it a large following, but also critics who question its use of personal data and concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly and restraint of trade. A hub of Google criticism exists on the Reddit online community /r/degoogle, and a grassroots movement has emerged to encourage people to abstain from using Google products.
In 2015, Google reorganized its interests into the holding company Alphabet Inc. While Google still retains its Internet search and advertising operations, other ventures such as longevity research firm Calico and home-products company Nest have been spun off into separate firms. Alphabet’s other major Internet-related businesses include the mobile operating system Android and the YouTube video-sharing site. The company also runs a fiber-optic Internet service called Google Fiber, which is only available in some places in the United States. For more about Google, see the Wikipedia article on Google. The term “googled” is also a verb that means to use the Google search engine. A simplified timeline of Google’s significant milestones is given below. This is a condensed version of an article that originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal.
