Google is an American multinational corporation that is part of Alphabet holding, investing in internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technology.
Google maintains and develops several Internet services and products and primarily profits from advertising through its Ads program. It is considered one of the "big four" technology companies along with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
Google's headquarters, the Googleplex | |||
| Formerly | Google Inc. (1998–2017) | ||
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| Type | Subsidiary (LLC) | ||
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| Founded | September 4, 1998 in Menlo Park, California, United States of America | ||
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| Headquarters | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California , U.S.A | ||
Area served | Worldwide | ||
Key people Sunday |
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| Products | List of products | ||
Number of employees | 139,995 (2021) | ||
| Parent | Alphabet Inc. | ||
| Website | www.google.com | ||
The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was first registered as a private company on January 4, 1996, and on August 19, 2004, it began selling its shares on the stock market. Then Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until 2024. The stated mission of the company from the very beginning was "organizing the world's information, making it accessible and useful to all", and the company's unofficial slogan, coined by Google engineer Paul Buckheit, - is "Don't be evil".
In 2003, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
On October 15, 2016, the company was reorganized into the international conglomerate Alphabet Inc.
Google operates more than a million servers in data centers around the world and processes more than a billion search queries and 24 petabytes of user data every day. Google's rapid growth since its inception has led to a large number of products that are not directly related to the company's main product, the search engine. Google has online products such as the Gmail mail service, and the Google+ social network. The company also has desktop products such as the Google Chrome browser, and Picasa photo software. and the Hangouts instant messaging program.
In addition, Google is developing the Android mobile operating system used on a large number of smartphones, as well as the Google Chrome OS operating system and Google Glass devices.
According to Alexa, Google's main site, google.com, is the most visited site on the Internet, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in, google.co.uk, etc.) are in the top 100 most visited sites, as are a few other Google services sites are YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut.
In May 2011, the number of unique monthly visitors to Google sites for the first time exceeded 1 billion people.
History
The Google search engine appeared in January 1996 as a research project of two students - Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were then studying at Stanford University in California.
While conventional search engines in those days sorted search results by the number of times search terms appeared on a page, Page and Brin speculated on a better system that would analyze relationships between sites. They called this new technology PageRank, the relevance of a site in it is determined by the number and importance of pages that link to the site.
By this time, there was already a small IDD Information Services RankDex search engine developed by Robin Lee, who had been studying a similar strategy for page ranking since 1996 (RankDex technology was patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China ).
Page and Brin originally named their search engine BackRub because the system checked backlinks to evaluate the importance of a site.
They eventually changed the name to Google, a misspelling of the word googol. The name change happened by accident when meeting with one of the founders of Sun Microsystems Andy Bechtolsheim. “This is very interesting,” Andy interrupted when Sergey began to demonstrate the capabilities of his search engine to him, “but I'm in a hurry. What do you say your company is called? And, having taken out a checkbook, he signed a 100 thousand dollar check to the name of the company Google Incorporated, which does not yet exist, declared by the dumbfounded Sergey. To receive money from the bank, it was necessary to register a company under this name, which was done later on September 4, 1998. The authorized capital was declared at 1 million dollars.
A googol is a number consisting of one and one hundred zeros - 1×10 100. A later ad campaign stated that it was chosen to show that the search engine wanted to provide people with more information. Google originally operated from the Stanford University website and had the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was registered on September 4, 1998. It was located in the garage of a friend of the founders (Susan Wojcicki ) in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, their classmate, was hired as the first employee.
Funding and initial public offering
Google's first funding was $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, in August 1998 before the company's incorporation.
In early 1999, while still graduate students, Brin and Page decided that their search engine was too much of a distraction from their studies. They offered the head of Excite, George Bell, to buy it for a million dollars, but he turned down the offer.
On June 7, 1999, a $25 million funding round was announced with major investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital venture capital firms.
Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at $85 per share. The shares were sold through a unique format online auction hosted by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, the deal's underwriters. The $1.67 billion IPO proceeds meant that Google's market capitalization was over $23 billion.
The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under Google's control, and many Google employees became stock millionaires overnight. Yahoo! _, a competitor to Google, also benefited as it owned 8.4 million Google shares before the IPO.
On October 31, 2007, the share price reached $700, primarily due to the large volume of sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The company is currently listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker GOOG and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker GGQ1.
On February 12, 2014, the company's capitalization reached $400 billion.
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved to Palo Alto, California, the city that is home to the headquarters of several other well-known Silicon Valley tech startups. The following year, contrary to Page and Brin's initial stance against an ad-funded search engine, Google began selling ads related to keyword searches. To maintain a minimalistic design, the ads were exclusively text-based.
In 2001, Google received a patent describing the PageRank mechanism. The patent was officially issued to Stanford University and credits Lawrence Page as the inventor.
In 2003, the company leased its current office complex from Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California. The complex has since become known as the Googleplex. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million. By this time, the name Google had entered everyday speech, as a result of which the verb "google" was added to the Merriam-Webster Academic Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. with the meaning "use the Google search engine to find information on the Internet".
Acquisitions and partnerships
Since 2001, Google has acquired many companies, focusing mainly on small venture capital firms.
In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole, Inc. This startup developed a product called Earth Viewer that hosted satellite photographs of the earth's surface. Google renamed the service " Google Earth " in 2005. Two years later, Google bought video hosting YouTube for $1.65 billion.
On April 13, 2007, Google acquired Internet advertising pioneer DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, giving Google the valuable connections that DoubleClick had with web publishers and advertising agencies. Later that year, Google acquired Grand Central for $50 million. This service became the basis for Google Voice.
On August 5, 2009, Google bought its first publicly traded video software company, On2 Technologies, for $106.5 million. Google also acquired the social search network Aardvark for $50 million.
In April 2010, Google acquired the startup Agnilux.
In addition to numerous acquisitions, Google has partnered with other organizations for everything from research to advertising.
In 2005, Google partnered with NASA's Ames Research Center to build 93,000 square meters of offices. The offices were dedicated to research projects related to big data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry.
In October 2005, Google entered into a partnership agreement with Sun Microsystems.
In addition, the company collaborated with AOL for the mutual improvement of video search services. That same year, Google, along with other companies including Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson, also funded a new top-level domain, Mobi. Google later launched Adsense for mobile, taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.
In 2006, Google and Fox Interactive Media signed an agreement to provide search and advertising on the Myspace social network.
In 2008, Google partnered with GeoEye to launch a satellite to provide Google Earth with high-resolution images. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008.
In the same year, Google, in partnership with Life magazine, hosted an archive of his photographs. Some of the images in the archive have never been published in the magazine.
In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project with a $38.8 million investment in two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced that it will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to power 55,000 homes. NextEra Energy Resources, which developed the power plants, sold a 20% stake in the project to Google to obtain funding for its development. Also, in 2010, Google acquired the Norwegian company Global IP Solutions, the developer of the web teleconferencing service.
In the same year, Google completed the acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob.
In July 2010, Google entered into an agreement with the Iowa wind farm to purchase 114 megawatts of power for 20 years.
In August 2011, it was announced that an agreement had been reached for Google's takeover of Motorola Mobility (one of two independent companies formed from the split of Motorola ), which produces mobile phones. The cost of the deal is $12.5 billion.
On May 22, 2012, the deal was completed. Google acquired Motorola Mobility, changing its CEO.
In 2018, Google acquired part of HTC. The cost of the deal is $1.1 billion. Since the deal, more than 2,000 HTC engineers will be developing Google gadgets, including Google Pixel smartphones.
In 2021, Google shut down the futuristic Project Loon. It was an attempt to provide the remote areas of the planet with the Internet using balloons. It lasted eight years, appeared on the front pages of the technological (and not only) press more than once, the band brought several discoveries, but in the end, the company admitted that the economy was not converging.
Guide
In July 2001, at the invitation of the founders of the company, the positions of chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of Google were taken by Eric Schmidt.
On April 4, 2011, Larry Page became CEO. Eric Schmidt remains Chairman of the Board of Directors of Google.
As of June 20, 2010, Page, Brin, and Eric Schmidt owned approximately 91% of Class B shares, which together provide their holders with 68% of the vote. The triumvirate has a decisive influence in resolving all issues related to the competence of shareholders.
In 2015, as a result of Google's reorganization and the creation of the Alphabet holding company, Sundar Pichai became the CEO of the company.
Shareholders
As of 2017, 81.21% of class A shares are owned by institutional investors, in particular :
- black rock
- FMR LLC
- State Street Corporation
- T. Rowe Price
Institutional investors also own 70% of class C shares, the largest stakes are held by the following :
- The Vanguard Group
- black rock
- FMR LLC
- State Street Corporation
- T. Rowe Price
Corporate culture
In 2013, for the fourth time, Google topped the list of 100 best employers in the United States, which is published annually by Fortune.
Google had a 20 percent program that allowed engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on projects that were not part of their job responsibilities
Recruitment
When hiring new employees, among other things, their ability to work in the existing corporate culture, in particular in a flat organizational structure and a rapidly changing environment, is assessed. A successful candidate must have talent, creativity, and passion, be ethical, open, and be able to impress even without a business suit.
Millions of resumes submitted online are first processed automatically, identifying those who could potentially fit the company.
To attract talent, the company hosts a Google Code Jam tournament among college students. In this tournament, programmers compete in solving problems against the clock. The 15 finalists are invited to Google headquarters for the final round.
In January 2018, former technologist James Damore filed a lawsuit in court accusing Google of discriminating against employees based on skin color and political views. James Damore himself was fired after making a statement about gender inequality.
Project Oxygen
Google conducted a massive study over two years, dubbed Project Oxygen, to develop its own model of a good leader. As a result, in March 2011, the following essential qualities of a good leader were published by Google:
- He is a good coach.
- He trusts the team, expands the area of responsibility of subordinates, and never micromanages.
- Interested in the success of team members, interested in the affairs of employees and their personal affairs.
- Helps subordinates to build a career.
- Has a clear team development plan, and sees the strategy.
- Possesses specialized skills and knowledge - if necessary, he must help his employees, give advice, express an expert opinion, etc.
Services and Tools
Search engine
The Google search engine occupies more than 60% of the world market. Every day it registers about 50 million search queries and indexes more than 8 billion web pages. Google can find information in 191 languages (as of December 2, 2009).
The Google interface contains a rather sophisticated query language that allows you to limit your search to specific domains, languages, file types, etc. For example, searching for "in the title: Google site: wikipedia.org" will return all Wikipedia articles in all languages that contain the word Google.
Other services
In addition to the search engine, Google provides many other services, such as Gmail and Hangouts. Google Maps has become the most popular service among third-party app creators. It is this service that leads as the basis of integrated applications ( eng. mashups ). While Google charges for API access to its services, Google Maps provides a free service if the mashup site is public and does not charge for Google Maps-based services. Corporate users can use this service on their intranets or commercial applications for a fee.
As part of other Google services, in particular Google Search, you can access Google data through an open API, but subject to a fee for every 1000 calls to Google servers.
On June 28, 2007, Google relaunched the Q&A service. Russia became the first country in the world where Google launched its own version of such a service.
On April 8, 2008, Google introduced its new platform for scalable web applications - Google App Engine. Up to this point, many technical analysts predicted that Google would eventually enter this market, following giants such as Amazon.com.
In 2014, the company registered the. g, google domain, a branded top-level domain (TLD) used in the Internet DNS. It is notable as one of the first generic top-level domains associated with a particular brand. The company planned to move several Alphabet products and domains to Google.
In 2015, Google began testing interactive billboards on the streets of London. The types of advertising materials shown on billboards depend on many factors: the current weather, current local events, information about traffic jams, current search queries, etc.
In May 2016, a new "smart" messenger Allo was presented. Thanks to Allo's built-in Google Assistant, the company receives all the texts sent in the chat, allows you to launch Internet searches from the chat, and offers users search queries, companies, and services that are relevant to the topic of the conversation. The Smart Reply feature offers quick response options using the database of the user's previous messages stored on the servers. The developers made sure that the messenger was protected from hacker hacking by other enterprises and individuals.
On December 5, 2018, Google announced that it would shut down the Allo messenger in March 2019.
In April 2019, the company released the new iOS app Google Fit for tracking physical activity.
On November 19, 2019, the Google Stadia cloud gaming streaming service, formerly known as Project Stream, became available in 30 countries around the world. The games of the service are available for various devices: laptops, desktops, TVs, tablets, and phones.
Charity
In 2004, Google created a non-profit charitable offshoot - Google.org (Google Foundation), with a start-up capital of about $ 1 billion. The main activities of this organization are informing society and helping to solve problems in the areas of climate change, global health, and poverty. One of his first projects is work in the field of hybrid and electric vehicles.
In 2007, Google became a sponsor and active participant in several gay pride parades in San Francisco, New York, Dublin, and Madrid.
In 2008, Google introduced the "10^100 project" in which everyone can submit ideas and then collectively choose one that will change the world and help as many people as possible. At the start of voting, over 150,000 ideas were submitted by people from 170 countries. 16 groups of ideas took part in the voting, from which up to 5 were selected, to help in the implementation of which Google allocated 10 million dollars.
In February 2010, Google donated $2 million to support syncspot. The money is directed to the syncspot. The fund used the money received for operating expenses, including investments in technical infrastructure, and for the development and support of the encyclopedia.
On January 22, 2019, it became known that Google Corporation donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Endowment and $1.1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as donated access to the Google Translate API through the content translation tool. This was announced by Ben Gomez, Google's vice president of search and news, on the company's official blog. The total amount of support for the Wikipedia project from Google will be more than $7.5 million.
Google and Society
- The Madagascar ant species Proceratium google was named after the Google Earth service that helped the discoverer in his research.
- The share of plagiarism in the total volume of theses and theses, which are defended at universities in Western Europe, reaches 30%. This figure is cited in the study " Google Copy-Paste Syndrome " by Austrian scientist Stefan Weber. He defines this phenomenon as “ text culture without brains ”.
- In 2021, Yulia Dmitrievna Solovieva, Managing Director of Google Russia, took second place in the ranking of senior executives in the Information Technology category according to the Kommersant Publishing House.
Violation of the right to privacy
For the first time, problems in connection with the violation of human rights at Google began in 2005. When creating Google Earth maps, images of the roof of the American White House were used, which poses a threat to the national security of the United States. The American public was deeply outraged that would-be terrorists were given a chance to take a close look at the White House's rooftop security system.
The next high-profile scandal associated with Google was a lawsuit against this company by the American Boring family from Pennsylvania.
In 2008, the Borings accused Google of violating their privacy. Images of the couple's home and swimming pool were used to create Google Street View's global urban virtual maps. The Borings immediately sued and demanded $25,000 from Google in compensation for moral damages.
However, their first claim was not satisfied. However, the litigation continued, and by a court decision in 2010, the Borings received compensation from the company of $1. However, Google representatives said: “Unfortunately, absolute privacy does not exist in the modern world, because there are images from satellites that film everything, ignoring the signs “private area”.” However, the company's specialists can remove images from their server if they are asked to do so privately.
Google was also opposed by the American National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC). As evidence of a violation of private rights by the service, members of the center provided information about one of the leaders of Google, collected using the company's services in less than half an hour - images of his house, the number of cars parked near him, the name of a company engaged in landscaping his territory, and even the name of a security company, whose clients are its neighbors.
Due to a large number of claims against the company, Eric Schmidt stated in 2009: “If you do not want someone to find out unnecessary information about you, then, first of all, do not do anything reprehensible.
In fact, search engines, including Google, store this information for some time. We are all subject to the authorities of the United States, so there may be a situation in which we will have to disclose information to the authorities”.
In 2010, a new scandal related to Google received a great public outcry. It became known that while working on the Street View service, the company scanned the IP addresses and passwords of citizens. While filming the streets and squares of different cities from special vehicles equipped with video cameras, Google specialists also scanned the signal of wireless Wi-Fi networks.
As a result, the company received passwords and other confidential information necessary to enter the e-mail of individuals and legal entities. Google representatives agreed that they made a big mistake, thus violating the right to privacy, and apologized.
However, they stated that they were not aware of the problem until the German authorities approached them with claims in this regard. Google specialists assured that the received private information was not used in the search server.
In the summer of 2013, thanks to former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden, it became known that the US government was paying Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook millions of dollars for the disclosure of information about Internet users (as part of the PRISM program ). The costs, according to documents, were covered by a division of the National Security Agency known as the Special Sources Division.
In response, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, posted an open letter on the company's blog to the U.S. Attorney General and FBI director, asking for permission to make it public regularly. See the Transparency Report for details on government requests, including requests based on the Foreign Intelligence Services Surveillance Act (FISA).
According to Drummond, the responses to these requests did not provide the US government with direct access to user data.
Currently, Google is seriously criticized for human rights violations related to the implementation of the Google Glass project. Wearing Google glasses is already banned in US movie theaters, casinos, and strip clubs. Their owners are afraid that visitors wearing such glasses will record what is happening on the video.
In addition, the decision to ban glasses may soon be taken by American banks and park directorates. Representatives of Google have not yet commented on this situation.
On August 5, 2014, Google reported to law enforcement agencies in the United States that one of the users of Gmail, a subsidiary of the email service, had photos of children with pornographic content, after which the user was arrested.
Participation in the affairs of foreign countries
Some Google experts took part in the events of the Arab Spring, advocating for democratic values and the protection of human rights. Thus, Wail Ghonim, director of marketing for Google in the Middle East and North Africa, advocated the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt during the unrest in the country in 2011.
He created a page on the social network Facebook, where the violence against the citizens of Egypt by the authorities was condemned and the actions of the demonstrators were coordinated. Ghonim described the Egyptian protest movement as a "Facebook revolution" and noted that the Internet played an extremely important role in it.
In addition, shortly after the events of the Arab Spring, Google representatives announced that they were working to facilitate access to information and products of the company in the Middle East and North Africa.
In this regard, the goal of the American company is to provide access to even more of its products in Arabic.
In 2011, the company launched the Arabic version of Google Voice and Google+ and presented two museums located in Qatar (the Museum of Islamic Art and the Mathaf Arab Museum of Contemporary Art ) in the +Art Project, and in 2012 invited the President of Tunisia to speak through the Google+ video broadcast service Hangout On Air.
Google also has serious claims against the Chinese leadership in connection with attempts to limit the access of Chinese citizens to information on the Internet.
Neologism "google"
Due to the popularity of the search engine, the neologism to google or to Google appeared in English (an analog in Russian computer slang is google), which is used to denote the search for information on the Internet using Google. It is with this definition that the verb is listed in the most authoritative dictionaries of the English language - the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, although other sources give examples of its use to mean searching for anything on the Internet at all.
The first person to use the word as a verb was Larry Page himself, signing one of his mailing list messages on July 8, 1998: "Have fun and keep googling!". The American Dialectic Society has named the verb "to google" the word of the decade.
Fearing possible trademark loss, Google frowns on the use of the verb google, especially when referring to Internet searches in general. For example, on February 23, 2003, the company sent a letter "a request to cease and desist ( eng. Cease and desist )" to Paul McPhaedris, founder of Word Spy, a site that tracks neologisms. Also in his Washington Post article» Frank Ahrens reviewed a letter received from Google lawyers illustrating the "correct" and "incorrect" use of the verb google.
In response to this article, the lexicographers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary noticed that they wrote down the verb to google with a lowercase letter, but they used a capital letter to designate the Google search engine ( eng. to use the Google search engine to seek online information - use Google to search for information in Internet ).
In 2006, Google released a public statement demanding that "Google-derived words should only be used when referring to Google Inc." or its services".
Censorship in the company
Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Alphabet Holding, said that Google, which is part of the holding, is working to lower the ranking of RT and Sputnik in the news selection.
Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications Andrey Svinsov said: “The fact that they decided in this way to actually isolate the RT and Sputnik sites from the search results in the media category indicates that they found the very format of pressure on our channels and agencies, which will allow, when entering a search query for one or other topics do not see our media. This is a powerful blow to Sputnik and RT.
This will actually completely remove any links to these media from the search results. This is an even more serious blow than the ban on commercialization. This will reduce attendance dozens of times”.
European Commission sanctions
On September 28, 2017, the European Commission imposed a €2.42 billion fine on Google for misrepresenting Google Search results in favor of its own Shopping extension. The message of the European Commission says that to increase the number of customers of the service from Google, the ratings of competitive platforms were deliberately underestimated, as a result of which their product offers were not issued on the first page of the search.
An antitrust investigation by the EC found that offers from Google's main competitors were displayed on pages four and beyond, which significantly allowed the company to increase the popularity of its own service.
On July 18, 2018, the EC again fined Google 4.35 billion euros as part of an antitrust investigation over allegations that the company abused its dominant position in the Internet search engine market by restricting the work of Android device manufacturers.
The EC report says that Google has been illegally regulating the work of mobile companies since 2011, and the investigation concerned three types of restrictions on mobile operators and manufacturers of Android gadgets. First, Google required manufacturers to preinstall Google Search and the Chrome browser on all Android phones so that they could be licensed to access the Play Store app store.
Second, Google Inc. gave bribes to large manufacturers and network operators, so that only the company's browser and search engine are preinstalled on the smartphone before the sale. Thirdly, Google prohibited the development and sale of devices running on alternative versions of Android.
The European Commission ordered Google to refrain from such activities about developers of devices and applications on the Android operating system within 90 days, and in case of non-compliance threatened with new sanctions and fines. The event was the largest-ever antitrust action against a single company on competition matters for European agencies.
Penalties
On July 13, 2021, the French competition authority published a decision imposing a fine of 500 million euros on Google for ignoring judicial acts regarding negotiations with press publishers and remuneration to editors.
On December 24, 2021, the Court of the Russian Federation fined Google 7.221 billion rubles.
