Google
is an American multinational technology company specializing in
internet-related products and services. This include online advertising and
technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are
derived from adwords, an online advertising service that places advertising
near the list of search results.
Google
was founded by Larry page and Sergey Brin while they were ph.D students at
Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but
control 16 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock.
They incorporated google as a
privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public
offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was
‘’to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful,’’ and its unofficial slogan was ‘’Don’t be evil’’. In 2004, Google
moved to its new headquarters in mountain view, California, nicknamed
Googleplex.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of
products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It
offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), a cloud computing
storage service (Google Drive), an office suite (Google Docs) and a social networking
service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing,
organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the
development of Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome Os
for a notebook known as chrome book. Google has moved increasingly to
communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in
the production of its ‘’high quality or low- cost’’ Nexus devices and acquired
Motorola mobility in 2012. In 2012 a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed
in Kansas city to facilitate a Google fiber broadband service. The corporation
has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around
the world (as of 2007).
It processes over one billion search requests and about 24
petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009). In December 2013, Alexa
listed google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous google
site in other languages figure in the top one hundred as do several other
google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger. Its market dominance has led to
prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues such
as search neutrality, copy- right, censorship, and privacy.
Google began in January 1996 as a search project by Larry
Page and Sergey Brin when they were PhD students at Stanford University in
Stanford, 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 relationship between
websites. They called this new technology Page Rank, it determined a website’s
relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that
linked back to the original site. A small search called ‘’Rank Dex’’ from IDD
information services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a
similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in Rank Dex
was patented in july 1999 and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine
‘’Back Rub’’, 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 hundred zeros,
which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide
large quantities of information. Originally, google ran under Stanford
University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.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
the garage of a friend Susan ( Wojcicki ) in Menlo park, California. Craig silvastein,
a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee. In may 2011,
the number of monthly unique visitors to google surpassed one billion for the
first time, an 8.4 percent increase from may 2010 (931 million). In January 2013, google announced it had earned
US$50 billion in annual revenue for the year 2012. This marked the first time
the company has reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of US$38 billion.
The
company has reported fourth quarter (Dec. 2014)
earnings per share (EPS) of $6.88-$0.20 under projections. Revenue came
in at $14.5 billion (16.9% growth year over year) also under expectation by
$110 million.
