What is Google?
Google has become one of the most successful companies of the modern age. Founded in 1998 in Mountain View, California, Google has become one of the most influential and innovative companies in the world. The company has since split into two different companies, Google, Inc., and its parent company Alphabet, Inc., which together now has a $2 trillion market cap. Despite its rapid growth, however, it has remained unaffected by the downturn in the economy.
The company’s core business is search, but it has also grown into several other areas. It offers email, calendar and time management services, video chat, and language translation services. Additionally, it offers many other tools and web services, including Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and Translate. There are also blog publishing, podcast hosting, and video sharing options that are a part of Google’s services. In addition to search, the company has expanded into a number of other areas.
Google is a major player in technology. It leads development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight proprietary operating system based on the open source GNU/Linux OS. In addition to software, the company has expanded into hardware. From 2010 to 2015, Google partnered with major electronic manufacturers to develop and sell its Google Nexus line of devices. In 2016, it released multiple hardware products, including the Google Pixel line of smartphones, Google Home smart speaker, and the new mesh wireless router. Moreover, it has even experimented with becoming an internet carrier.
In 2010, Page and Brin renamed their company Google after a mathematical term, googol (one followed by 100 zeroes). As the company grew, they moved to Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. A $100,000 investment from Andy Bechtolsheim was needed to incorporate the company. The company was founded on July 10 and launched on July 4, 2019. As of this writing, the site has been the most visited website in the world.
In recent years, Google has entered hardware. In the past decade, it has developed mobile phones called the Nexus. It also developed the Chrome OS operating system for laptops and other electronic devices. From 2011 to 2015, the company partnered with major electronics manufacturers to produce its Nexus line of smartphones. In 2016, the company launched multiple hardware products, including the Google Pixel line of smartphones, the Google Home smart speaker, and the Google Wifi mesh wireless router.
In 2012, the company indexed 30 trillion web pages and received 100 billion searches per month. As of April 2013, Google had indexed over 30 trillion web pages. This is a huge amount of content, but it caches much of it. Other applications developed by Google include Gmail and Google Desktop Search. Both of these programs are built on top of their own search functions, and have been popular with the public. But there are also controversies surrounding their use of data.