Google - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Internet company. For the number, see Googol. For the search engine, see Google Search.
Google
FormerlyGoogle Inc. (1998–2017)
Company typeSubsidiary (LLC)
Industry
Founded1995 (first prototype)
1997 (second prototype)
September 4, 1998; 26 years ago (1998-09-04) (final launch)[a] in Menlo Park, California, U.S.
Founders
Headquarters1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,
Mountain View, California
,
U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
ProductsList of Google products
Number of employees
114,096 (Q3 2019)
ParentIndependent (1997-2015)
Alphabet Inc. (2015–present)
Websitegoogle.com
Footnotes / references
[5][6][7][8]

Google is an American multinational corporation from the United States. known for creating and running one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web, also known as the (WWW). Every day more than a billion people use it. Google's headquarters (known as the "Googleplex") is in Mountain View, California, part of Silicon Valley. The motto of Google is "Do the right thing".

Since September 2, 2015, Google has been owned by a holding company called Alphabet Inc.. That company has taken over some of Google's other projects, such as its driverless cars. It is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL.

Google's search engine can find pictures, videos, news, Usenet newsgroups, and things to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web pages on its database, 880 million pictures and 845 million Usenet messages—six billion things.[9] Google's American website has an Alexa rank of 1, meaning it is the most widely visited website in the world. It is so widely known that people sometimes use the word "google" as a verb that means "to search for something on Google". Because more than half of people on the web use it, "google" has also been used to mean "to search the web". Most importantly, Google created the Google Gnome Game in June of 2010.[10]

History

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, USA, started BackRub in early 1996. 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, and then later moved to Googleplex.[11][12]

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 a percentage of its money through America Online and InterActiveCorp. It has a special group known as the Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps make contracts, helps to make accounts better and gives engineering help.

Advertising

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Google makes money by advertising. People or companies who want people to buy their product, service, or ideas 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 website. From this and other data, Google makes a profile about the person and then uses this profile to figure out which advertisements to show.

Branding

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The name "Google" is a play of the word googol.[13][14] Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this word in 1937, for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes (10100). Google uses this word because the company wants to make lots of stuff on the Web easy to find and use. Andy Bechtolsheim 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 1010100.

Products

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References

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  1. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Alex (September 4, 2014). "Google Used to Be the Company That Did 'Nothing But Search'". Time.
  2. ↑ Telegraph Reporters (September 27, 2019). "When is Google's birthday – and why are people confused?". The Telegraph.
  3. ↑ Griffin, Andrew (September 27, 2019). "Google birthday: The one big problem with the company's celebratory doodle". The Independent. Archived from the original on January 12, 2021. Retrieved June 1, 2020.
  4. ↑ Wray, Richard (September 5, 2008). "Happy birthday Google". The Guardian.
  5. ↑ "Company – Google". January 16, 2015. Archived from the original on January 16, 2015. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
  6. ↑ Claburn, Thomas (September 24, 2008). "Google Founded By Sergey Brin, Larry Page... And Hubert Chang?!?". InformationWeek. UBM plc. Archived from the original on June 28, 2011. Retrieved January 22, 2017.
  7. ↑ "Locations — Google Jobs". Archived from the original on September 30, 2013. Retrieved September 27, 2013.
  8. ↑ "Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter 2018 Results" (PDF) (Press release). Mountain View, California: Alphabet Inc. February 4, 2019. p. 1. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 4, 2019. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2018. [...] Q1 2018 financial highlights[:] The following summarizes our consolidated financial results for the quarters ended December 31, 2017 and 2018 [...]: [...] Number of employees [as of] Three Months Ended December 31, 2018 [is] 98,771[.]
  9. ↑ Press, Associated (2004-02-18). "Google expands its search engine". the Guardian. Retrieved 2020-07-21.
  10. ↑ Morris, Seren (2020-05-01). "Popular Google Doodle Games: Launch Garden Gnomes From a Catapult". Newsweek. Retrieved 2024-09-04.
  11. ↑ Brin, Sergey; Page, Lawrence (1998). "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" (PDF). Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 30 (1–7): 107–117. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.115.5930. doi:10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X. ISSN 0169-7552. S2CID 7587743.
  12. ↑ Barroso, L.A.; Dean, J.; Holzle, U. (April 29, 2003). "Web search for a planet: the google cluster architecture". IEEE Micro. 23 (2): 22–28. doi:10.1109/mm.2003.1196112. S2CID 15886858. We believe that the best price/performance tradeoff for our applications comes from fashioning a reliable computing infrastructure from clusters of unreliable commodity PCs.
  13. ↑ Koller, David. "Origin of the name, "Google." Stanford University. January, 2004.
  14. ↑ "Google revolution", How it Works, no. 37, Imagine Publishing, pp. 40–43, 2012-08-09
  15. ↑ "Deja News - Fanlore".
  16. ↑ "Google Play". Retrieved 2018-11-23.
  17. ↑ Zochodne, Geoff (6 June 2019). "Order of Canada architect, Silicon Valley investor call for rethink of Sidewalk Labs' Toronto waterfront project". Financial Post.
  18. ↑ "Google acquires Tenor, popular GIF platform that advertisers love". HT Tech. 28 March 2018. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
  19. ↑ Elias, Jennifer (27 June 2023). "Google cuts jobs at Waze as it continues to merge mapping products". CNBC. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
  20. ↑ "Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn". BBC. 10 October 2006. Retrieved 11 September 2023.

Notes

  1. ↑ Google was originally incorporated on September 4, 1998, however, since 2002, the company has celebrated its anniversaries on various days in September, most frequently on September 27.[1][2][3] The shift in dates reportedly happened to celebrate index-size milestones in tandem with the birthday.[4]

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