Google Inc. is an
American multinational corporation which provides Internet-related
products and services, including Internet search, cloud computing,
software and advertising technologies.Advertising revenues
from AdWords generate almost all of the company's profits.The
company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while
both attended Stanford University.
Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake. Google was
first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and
its initial public
offering followed on August 19, 2004. The company's mission
statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and
make it universally accessible and useful",and the company's unofficial
slogan is "Don't be evil". In
2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.Rapid growth
since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and
partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company
offers online productivity software including email, an office suite,
and social networking. Google's products extend to the desktop as well,
with applications for web browsing, organizing & editing photos, and instant
messaging. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating
system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system, found
on specialized netbooks called Chromebooks.Google has been
estimated to run over one million servers in data centers around the world,and
process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytesof
user-generated data every day.As of September 2009 Alexa listed the
main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and
numerous international Google sites as being in the top hundred, as well as
several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger and Orkut. Google
also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.The
dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the
company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.Google
began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when
they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.While
conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the
search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that
analyzed the relationships between websites.They called this new technology PageRank,
where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages,
and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.A
small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services
designed by Robin Liwas, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy
for site-scoring and page ranking.The technology in RankDex would be patented and
used later when Li founded Baidu in China.Page and Brin originally
nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system
checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.Eventually, they changed
the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",the
number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the
search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.Originally,
Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.The domain
name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was
incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki)
garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student
at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.In May 2011, the number of monthly
unique visitors to Google surpassed 1 billion for the first time, an 8.4
percent increase from May 2010 (931 million).
Net income $ 9.737 billion (2011)
Total assets $ 72.574 billion (2011)