What is Google?
The company was founded by Stanford University graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Originally named BackRub, it was renamed Google in 1998 after the founders received $100,000 in seed funding from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.
Today, the company has many different products and services. They include the Google search engine, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Photos, and more.
Origins
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world and a dominant force in online search. It also offers a range of other Internet services and products, including email, office software applications, mapping and navigation programs, video sharing platforms, photo and cloud storage solutions, mobile operating systems, and ML frameworks. Its prominence and dominance has raised privacy concerns and fueled criticism of its monopoly power.
The company’s history is marked by technological breakthroughs and gargantuan business moves. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met in 1995 when they both enrolled in Stanford’s graduate program for computer science. The pair began researching the behavior of links between pages on the growing World Wide Web and developed a system that would analyze their connections to create an index for the web. They called this new search engine Backrub.
Soon after, the duo renamed their project Google, a skewed spelling of googol, a mathematical term meaning 10 to the 100th power or an infinite number of zeroes. The name change reflected the duo’s vision of an infinite amount of information on the web that could be organized and searched with this tool.
In 1998, Google incorporated with $100,000 in funding from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Over the next few years, Google began purchasing small companies that had innovative teams and products. These acquisitions included Upstartle, a start-up that produced the online collaborative word processor Writely, and Blogger, a leading web log publishing platform.
Products
Google offers a huge range of services and products designed to help people search the internet, manage email, navigate the world, collaborate on documents, store files or simply be more productive. The company’s flagship products include its Search and Maps search engines, Gmail email service, Android mobile phone software, Chrome web browser and YouTube video streaming platform. It also provides tools for developers, cloud storage and virtual reality applications.
Other well-known Google apps include Calendar and Maps, its online photo-sharing service Picasa, and the mobile-only messaging app Hangouts. The company also operates a number of hardware platforms such as its Pixel smartphone line, the Chromecast in-home streamer and the Google Nest smart home device.
The company’s many specialized products and services are powered by massive computing infrastructure, including 11 data centres around the world that host several million interlinked computers. These run Google’s proprietary computer programs, including the file system GFS, its database program Bigtable and its mapping programme MapReduce.
Other key computer software produced by Google includes the Android Studio development environment, Dart, a structured web programming language and Flutter, a cross-platform mobile application development tool. The company also has numerous open source projects, such as reCAPTCHA, the popular web security solution, and the ARDA project, which automates the process of diagnosing retinal disease. It also supports various libraries and APIs, such as Protocol Buffers, Shaderc, American fuzzy lop and the Jupyter notebook.
Services
Google has a wide range of products and services, but its most popular product is the search engine. The company has data centers around the world, and its staff includes engineers working on quality control for its search algorithms. In addition to its core search engine, the company also offers products like Google News, Gmail and Google Maps.
The Google search engine is powered by several hundred thousand computers, which are interlinked using proprietary computer code. The company’s servers handle billions of queries each day, and it collects and stores huge amounts of data.
Some of the company’s services are free, while others require a subscription fee or some other form of payment. Google App Engine allows developers to create scalable web services using the company’s resources. Google Analytics provides website owners with data about their visitors.
Other Google services include Google Docs, which allows users to edit documents together online. It also offers Google Sheets, a service similar to Microsoft Excel, and Google Slides, which is a presentation program.
Google has also developed a number of mobile apps and devices, including Android smartphones and tablets. Its Chromecast streaming device can cast video content from a smartphone or tablet to a television. Other Google-developed hardware includes the Nexus Q digital media player and the Chromecast Ultra. The company has acquired a number of other technology companies and operates some through its subsidiary Alphabet Inc. Other Alphabet subsidiaries include health company Calico, tech industry private equity firm CapitalG and “moonshot” technology developer X Development.
Investors
Google is one of the most successful public companies of the 21st century. Since its initial public offering in 2004, it has grown from an unknown company processing billions of search queries a day to one of the most valuable corporations in the world. Its success has made many investors rich. However, no single investor or group owns the entire company. The decision-making power is spread among several stakeholders like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the original co-founders of Google, as well as large organizations such as BlackRock and Vanguard.
The company has an intricate share structure with three classes of shares. Each class has different voting rights. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page own Class B shares, which give them super-voting rights. But they can sell these shares at any time. If they do, these shares will automatically convert to regular Class A shares that only have one vote per share.
The other class of shares is Class C, which are not entitled to super-voting rights. These shares are intended to keep everyday investors on equal footing with institutional shareholders. The company has a lot of different divisions and businesses, but the core business is still internet search. However, the company also invests in so-called “moonshots” like driverless cars, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. These investments are under the umbrella of Google X, the company’s high-tech laboratory for futuristic experiments.
