Google

Google began as a search project developed at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their early work ranked webpages partly by analyzing links between them, helping produce results that were often more useful than pages ordered only by keyword frequency.² Google incorporated in 1998 and grew rapidly as internet access expanded. Its early business model centered on search advertising, while the company also licensed search technology to other websites.

In 2015, Google became the principal subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a holding company created to separate the core internet business from longer-term projects and other subsidiaries.¹ Sundar Pichai became Google’s chief executive and later Alphabet’s chief executive. The restructuring preserved Google’s central services while giving Alphabet a broader corporate framework.

Google Search is the company’s best-known service and organizes information from an enormous, continually changing index of the web. Its ranking systems use many signals, including relevance, quality, language, location, and the nature of a query; the company periodically changes these systems to address spam and improve results.³

Advertising remains central to Google’s business. Search ads are generally displayed in response to queries, while display and video advertising can appear across websites, applications, and services such as YouTube. Google’s advertising infrastructure connects advertisers, publishers, and users, but has also attracted scrutiny from regulators over market power, data practices, and the treatment of competing services.⁴ Search results can include maps, news, images, shopping information, and direct answers, making the service more than a conventional list of hyperlinks.

Google operates a broad group of consumer and enterprise products. Android is a mobile operating system used by device manufacturers; Chrome is a web browser; Gmail provides email; Google Maps offers mapping and navigation; and YouTube, acquired in 2006, hosts user-uploaded and professionally produced video.¹ Google Workspace combines services such as Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Meet for organizations and individuals.

Google Cloud provides computing, storage, databases, data analytics, and artificial-intelligence services to businesses and public institutions. The company also conducts research in areas including machine learning, quantum computing, health, and climate science. DeepMind, founded independently in the United Kingdom and acquired by Google in 2014, became part of Google DeepMind, linking advanced research with the company’s broader artificial-intelligence work.⁵

Google’s influence extends beyond its most visible products. The company maintains open-source projects, contributes to web standards, and operates major infrastructure for content delivery, cybersecurity, and internet services. Its Google Public DNS service, launched in 2009, offers recursive domain-name resolution as an alternative to an internet service provider’s default resolver.⁶

Google has also shaped everyday language: “to google” became a widely recognized verb for searching online, although the company has defended its trademark against uses that could make the name a generic term. Its history includes discontinued products as well as enduring ones, illustrating the experimental character of its portfolio. At the same time, Google faces continuing debates about privacy, copyright, content moderation, competition, labor, and the environmental cost of data centers. These issues have produced investigations and legal cases in multiple jurisdictions, including major antitrust proceedings in the United States and European Union.⁴

Alphabet Inc.

The parent holding company formed in 2015 above Google and several other businesses.

Search engine

A service that retrieves and ranks information in response to a user’s query.

Search advertising

Paid promotion displayed in connection with search queries.

Google Cloud

Google’s suite of cloud-computing, storage, data, and artificial-intelligence services.

Android

A mobile operating system developed by Google and used across many manufacturers’ devices.