What Is Google?
Google is the world’s most popular search engine, and one of the Internet’s most important companies. It’s also a leading maker of computer hardware, mobile applications, and cloud computing software. Its dominance has given it a certain cultural significance, to the point where many people simply use the term “Googled” to refer to searching for information online.
Google was founded in 1995 by two students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They worked together to develop Backrub, a web search program that analyzed the content of webpages and sorted them by popularity. Their system used links to determine how relevant a webpage was, an idea that became the basis for the Google algorithm that dominates the modern world of search engines.
In 1998, the company was incorporated and began receiving outside investment. They decided to name the company Google, a misspelling of the word googol, which is a number with 100 zeroes. The company grew quickly, and in 2004, it had its first public offering of stock. It’s now worth billions of dollars.
In addition to its well-known search engine, Google operates several other services including Gmail for email, YouTube for video sharing, and Google Maps for navigation. The company also has a social network called Google+, though it’s not as successful as Facebook or Twitter.
The company has a huge infrastructure of data centers and servers around the world. Its core technology is built around three proprietary pieces of code: GFS handles the storage of data in chunks across several machines; Bigtable stores data in a database format; and MapReduce processes large amounts of data to generate higher-level statistics. The company uses these systems to make its vast collection of data available to users in a timely manner.
As the company grew, it took on new projects such as Google Books, which aimed to scan millions of books and put them online. This project was controversial, as some authors and publishers were worried about copyright issues. Ultimately, Google settled with them, and the books are now available online for free.
Google also developed Chrome, a web browser that is available on computers running Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s the most popular browser in the world, and it helped launch the ChromeOS operating system that powers Google’s Pixel smartphone line, Chromecast in-home streaming device, and Chromebook laptops.
In 2015, the company renamed itself Alphabet Inc., with Google being the parent company of the rest of the group, including other websites and research laboratories such as Google X. Current CEO Sundar Pichai oversees all of the company’s operations. Its main product is still its search engine, which is used by more than 70% of the world’s Internet users. It also offers other products such as Google Chrome, Google Apps, and the Google Assistant personal assistant. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. As of 2019, it employs about 80,000 employees worldwide. Its stock is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GOOG.
