Google

This page is about the Internet company. For the number, see Googol.

Google Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: GOOG NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component
Industry	Internet Computer software Telecoms equipment
When it was created	Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998 (1998-09-04))
People who started it	Sergey Brin, Larry Page
Headquarters	Googleplex, Mountain View, Mountain View, California, U.S.
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Joseph Bailey (Co-founder) Eric Schmidt (Executive Chairman) Larry Page (Co-founder & CEO) Sergey Brin (Co-founder)
Things made	See list of Google products
Money earned	US$ 59.82 billion (2013)
Operating income	US$ 13.96 billion (2013)
Profit	US$ 12.92 billion (2013)
Total assets	US$ 110.92 billion (2013)
Total equity	US$ 87.30 billion (2013)
Employees	47,756 (Q4 2013)
Parent	Alphabet Inc.
Subsidiaries	AdMob, DoubleClick, On2 Technologies, Picnik, YouTube, Zagat, Waze, Blogger, SlickLogin, Boston Dynamics, Bump, Nest Labs, Google DeepMind, WIMM One, VirusTotal, Google X, Motorola Mobility, Google.org, Google Store, Boston Dynamics, Keyhole, Inc
Website	google.com
References:

A man signing in at Google's main office, Googleplex.

Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation that is best known for running one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web (WWW). Every day, 200 million (200,000,000) people use it. Google's main office ("Googleplex") is in Mountain View, California, USA.

With Google Search, people can also search for pictures, Usenet newsgroups, news, and things to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web pages on its database, 880 million (880,000,000) pictures and 845 million (845,000,000) Usenet messages — six billion things.

"To google," as an action word (verb) means "to search for something on Google". Because Google is so popular (more than half of people on the web use it) it has been used to mean "to search the web". Google dislikes this use since the name of the company is a trademark.

As a public company, Google Inc. trades on the NASDAQ under the tickers GOOG and GOOGL.

In August 2015, Google announced it was being restructured under a new holding company called Alphabet Inc.

History

Google was started in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, USA. It used to be called Backrub. Later, they made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California. Later that year, it moved to another place, now called the "Googleplex".

In September 2001, Google's rating system ("PageRank", for saying which information is more helpful) got a U.S. Patent. The patent was to Stanford University, with Lawrence (Larry) Page as the inventor (the person who first had the idea).

Google makes an important, though shrinking, percentage of its money through its friends like America Online and InterActiveCorp. It has a special group known as the Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps make contracts, helps making accounts better, and gives engineering help.

How Google makes money

Google makes money by advertising. People or companies who want to make other people visit their website give Google money, and Google shows an advertisement to people Google thinks will click on the advertisement. Google only gets money when people click on the link, so it tries to know as much about people as possible to only show the advertisement to the "right people". It does this with Google Analytics, which sends data back to Google whenever someone visits a web site. From this and other data, Google makes a profile about the person, which it then uses to figure out which advertisements to show.

The name "Google"

The name "Google" is a misspelling of the word googol. Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this word in 1938, for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes ($10^{100}$). It is said that the word "googol" was chosen as a name for this number because it sounded like baby talk. Google uses this word because the company wants to make lots of stuff on the Web easy to find and use. Andy Bechtolsheim first thought of the name.

The name for Google's main office, the "Googleplex," is a play on a different, even bigger number, the "googolplex", which is 1 followed by one googol of zeroes.

Google's products

• Android is an operating system for mobile devices and was originally made by Google as part of the Open Handset Alliance, which Google leads. It is the chief competitor to Apple's iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone by Microsoft.
• Froogle (Now renamed to Google Product Search) lets the user find out about things for sale on the Internet. Its name is a combination of "Google" and "frugal", which means smart with money.
• Google Books lets people search for books.
• Google Calendar is an online calendar.
• Google Checkout is a way to pay online. Users can send money using their credit cards or bank accounts to other users.
• Google Chrome is a web browser that Google made
• Google Dictionary is a dictionary that can be in many languages.
• Google Drive is an online document editor.
• Google Earth is the 3D version of Google Maps with a digital globe.
• Google Groups is a place for users to discuss topics.
• Google Images is an image search utility.
• Google Language Tools; Google Translate is an online translation service. It can translate websites and text into other languages.
• Gmail is an e-mail service that Google started in 2004. It is called Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany. Users get free space to store e-mail.
• Google News is a facility which shows news stories from over 4,500 news sources. Google News Archives
• Google Maps is a service from Google to provide satellite pictures and road maps for everywhere around the world.
• Google Pack is a pack of Google software.
• Google Talk is an instant messenger where you can talk to friends.
• Google Video is an online collection of videos which have been uploaded by users from around the world.
• Google Knol was an online encyclopedia.
• Google Picasa is a software for organizing and editing photos.
• Google Sites is a service for making websites.
• Google Wave was a software for discussing with other people live.
• Google Buzz was an update and photo sharing service.
• Google Alerts Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
• Google Adsense is a free program that enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads and earn money.
• Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
• Google Base is the "Google Merchant Center", where you can upload your product feeds and make them easy to find on Google Product Search.
• Blogger is a free tool that allows users to publish blogs on a Google website.
• Google+ is a social networking service operated by Google Inc. that is like Facebook. The service launched on June 28, 2011, and is currently out of testing and working.

Other websites

Find more information on Google by searching one of Wikipedia's sister projects:

Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews
Images and media from Wikiversity
Images and media from Wikispecies
Database entry from Wikidata
Documentation from MediaWiki

• Corporate homepage
• The search engine
• Google at the Open Directory Project
• Google at CrunchBase