Google Overview

Google

Google LLC is an American multinational tech company that places its concentration on search engine technology, cloud computing, quantum computing, online advertising, e-commerce, artificial intelligence and consumer electronics. This company is referred to as one of the most powerful companies in the globe. The company is also considered as one of the most valuable brands in the world because of its market dominance, data collection and tech advantages in the field of AI.

The company was established on the 4^th of September 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while studying for their PhD at Stanford University, California. The company went public in 2004 via an IPO. The company is recognized as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc since 2015.

Google has expanded rapidly to offer a multitude of products and services other than Google search. Many of this products have dominance in today’s market and address a wide range of use cases. The company strives for ambitious technological innovations that is focused on solving peoples’ biggest problems.

These innovative projects include  Sycamore which improves quantum computing, Waymo which focuses on self driving technology, Google brain and Side Walk labs.

Google and its subsidiary, YouTube are the two most visited site globally. Google is also the largest mapping, navigation and E-mail provider. The company was ranked second on the Forbes list of most valuable brands and 4th by Interbrand.

Google Inc. began in January 1996  by Sergey Brin and Larry Page during their PhD  at Stanford University, California. This project actually has an official third founder who goes by the name of Scott Hassan who wrote most of the code for the first Google search engine but left before the company became big as he wanted to pursue a career in robotics. He even started his own company which goes by the name: Willow Garage in 2006.

Page and Brin theorized about a better system that analyze relationships among websites. This algorithm determined a website relevance by the number and the importance of pages that linked back to the original site. Page told Scott about the concepts which Scott then put into code to implement them.

Page and Brin nicknamed the search engine BackRub because of its future to check back links to estimate the importance of a site. Scott and Alan Stemberg named by the founders of Google as being critical to the development of the company.

Page rank was influenced by a page ranking and side scoring algorithm used for Rankdex which was developed by Robin Li in 1996. Larry Page rank patent included a citation to Li’s earlier Rank Dex patent. Li, the Chinese software engineer founded Baidu in the later years.

The name of the company was later changed to Google from BackRub. The domain name www.google.com was registered on the 15^th of September 1997 and the company was incorporated on the 4^th of September 1998 and was located in the garage of Susan Wojcki in Menlo Park CA. Craig Silverstein a fellow PhD student at Stanford was hired as the company’s first employee.

A few weeks before Google was formally established on September7,1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000 in the company in August 1998. To be able to use the money from this initial investment, the company had to be incorporated. Because David Cheriton worked close by at Stanford and they were aware of his startup expertise thanks to the recent $220 million sale of the business he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco, Page and Brin first turned to him for assistance.

David set up a meeting between Page, Brin, and Andy Bechtolsheim, another co-founder of Granite. Because Andy had another meeting at Cisco, where he worked following the acquisition, at 9 AM, the meeting, which was scheduled for 8 AM in the front porch of David’s Palo Alto home, had to be brief. Later, David Cheriton contributed $250,000 to the cause.

In 1998, entrepreneur Ram Shriram and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos each contributed money to the company. Shriram, a venture capitalist, had been contacted by Page and Brin for funding and advice. In February1998, Shriram made a $250,000 investment in Google. Because Amazon had purchased Junglee, where Shriram served as president, Bezos was a person whom Shriram knew. Shriram introduced Bezos to Google. Six months after Shriram made his investment, Bezos asked Shriram to meet Google’s founders while he and his wife were on vacation in the Bay Area. They eventually had their meeting. The initial round of fundraising for Google had already officially ended, but Bezos’ position as the CEO of Amazon convinced Page and Brin to prolong the round and accept his contribution.

In order to open their first office in Menlo Park, California, Google raised about $1,000,000 from these initial investors, friends, and family.

A new $25 million round of funding was announced on June7,1999 with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. This followed some additional, smaller investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999. Both companies were initially hesitant to invest in Google together because they each wanted to hold onto a larger portion of the company’s power. However, Larry and Sergey insisted on accepting investments from each. Due to their trust in Google’s tremendous potential and thanks to the mediation of earlier angel investors Ron Conway and Ram Shriram who had connections in the venture businesses, both venture companies ultimately decided to invest collectively $12.5 million each.

The business relocated its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, in March1999, which is the location of numerous notable Silicon Valley technological start-ups. Despite Page and Brin’s initial objections to an advertisement-supported search engine, Google started selling ads for search terms the following year. All adverts were text-based in order to preserve a clean page design. It was announced in June 2000 that Google would replace Inktomi as the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most well-known websites at the time.

After outgrowing its first two locations, the business leased an office building from Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, in 2003. The complex was given the name Googleplex, a play on the word “googolplex,” which is composed of the numbers one and googol zeroes. Three years later, the company paid $319 million to SGI to acquire the property. By that point, the word “Google” had entered common usage and was defined as “to use the Google search engine to get information on the Internet” in both the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. In a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode from October 2002, the verb was first used on television.

Additionally, in 2001, Google’s investors decided to choose Eric Schmidt as the company’s chairman and CEO because they recognized the need of having a strong internal management team. John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins suggested Eric. For several months, he had been looking for a CEO that Sergey and Larry would approve, but they had turned down a number of applicants because they wanted to maintain control of the business. During investment discussions, Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital demanded that Google immediately repay Sequoia’s $12.5 million investment if they failed to honor their verbal commitment to appoint a chief executive officer.

Because the company’s potential hadn’t yet been publicly acknowledged and because he was preoccupied with his duties as CEO of Novell, Eric was originally hesitant to join Google as well. Eric committed to acquire $1 million of the company’s preferred stock as a condition of joining in order to demonstrate his dedication and give the company the money it required.

Google went public on August 19,2004, through an initial public offering. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt made a deal at that time to collaborate at Google for 20 years, or until the year 2024. 19,605,052 shares were made available by the corporation for a price of $85 each. Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, the deal’s underwriters, created a system for the online auction sale of the shares. Google’s market capitalization increased to more than $23 billion after the selling of $1.67 billion worth of their shares.

Google Inc. Enters Mobile Phone Market

The first Android phone under Google’s own brand, the Nexus One, was made available in January 2010. A number of phones and tablets were produced under the “Nexus” name up until its final demise in 2016 and replacement by the new Pixel brand.

Google Inc. Becomes an Internet Provider

With experimental ambitions to develop an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000–500,000 consumers in one or more American cities, Google unveiled the Google Fiber project in February 2010. Google Fiber was transferred to Alphabet’s Access division after the company underwent a corporate restructuring that made Alphabet Inc. Google’s parent company.

Google Inc. Expansion

In 2011, Google processed about 3 billion queries daily. The company constructed 11 data centers with thousands of servers to manage this workload. The company was able to manage the constantly shifting workload more effectively thanks to these data centers. For the first time, in May 2011, the search engine received more than one billion monthly visitors.

For $1.65 billion in Google stock, Google purchased YouTube on November13, 2006. The company introduced “AdSense for Mobile” in 2007, capitalizing on the expanding mobile advertising market.

On March11, 2008, Google paid $3.1 billion to acquire DoubleClick. As a result, DoubleClick’s valuable connections with Web publishers and advertising agencies were transferred to the company.

Google made its largest acquisition to date in May 2012 when it paid $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility. This purchase was made in part to assist Google in acquiring Motorola’s sizable patent portfolio on mobile devices and wireless technologies, to aid Google in defending itself in its ongoing patent disputes with other tech giants, primarily Apple and Microsoft, and to enable it to continue offering Android without restriction.

Waze was purchased by Google in June 2013 for $966 million. The social components of Waze, such as its crowdsourced location network, were apparently useful connectors between Waze and Google Maps, Google’s own mapping service, even though Waze would continue to exist independently.

On September19,2013, the company announced the establishment of a new business called Calico, to be run by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. The “health and well-being” company would concentrate on “the challenge of ageing and accompanying disorders,” according to Page’s official public statement.

Google announced in January26, 2014, that it has reached an agreement to buy DeepMind Technologies, a privately held artificial intelligence business in London. The company was reportedly bought for $400 million, according to the technology news website Recode, but the information’s source was not made clear. A representative for Google declined to comment on the cost. The company’s recent expansion in the robotics and artificial intelligence communities is made possible by the acquisition of DeepMind.

Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator that integrates cellular and Wi-Fi networks from various telecommunications carriers to offer seamless access and a strong Internet signal, was introduced by Google in April 2015.

Google announced plans to consolidate its numerous businesses under the name Alphabet Inc. on August 10, 2015. Google became Alphabet’s main subsidiary and the holding company for all of the corporation’s online ventures. After the restructure was finished, Larry Page took over as CEO of Alphabet, and Sundar Pichai took over as CEO of Google.

As every company, Google has had its own share of controversies and we are going to discuss them.

On August 8,2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he circulated a memo arguing that bias and “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion and that average women are less interested than men in technical positions due to biological factors, not just discrimination. Damore was fired the same day after being charged with violating company policy by “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

As staff protested company decisions on internal sexual harassment, Dragonfly, a censored Chinese search engine, and Project Maven, a military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue growth for the company, tensions between the company’s leadership and its employees grew between 2018 and 2019.

The New York Times published the exposé titled “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’iIn 2018. Following that, the business declared that “48 employees have been sacked over the last two years” due to sexual misconduct. More than 20,000 Google staff members and contractors participated in a worldwide walkout on November 1 to express their disapproval of the way the corporation handles sexual harassment claims. CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly supported the demonstrations.

The company stated on March19, 2019, that it would build Google Stadia, a cloud gaming platform, and enter the video game industry.

The US Department of Justice announced on June 3, 2019, that it would look into Google for possible antitrust violations. The corporation was accused of abusing its dominant position in the search and search advertising sectors, which resulted in the launch of an antitrust action in October 2020.

Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Google announced a number of cost-cutting initiatives in April 2020. The pace and focus of investments in areas like data centers and machines, as well as non-business essential marketing and travel, were adjusted as part of these measures. Hiring was also slowed down for the remainder of 2020, with the exception of a small number of strategic areas. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of staff were also working from home, and because of its success, Google announced that they would permanently change part of their roles to allow for working from home.

Three outages in 2020 hit Google services: one in August that primarily affected Google Drive, another in November that primarily affected YouTube, and a third in December that primarily affected the whole suite of Google applications. The three outages were all fixed in a matter of hours.

The Alphabet Workers Union, which is primarily made up of Google employees, was established in 2021.

The Australian government put out legislation in January 2021 that would make Google and Facebook pay media firms for the privilege of using their content. Google retaliated by threatening to block access to its search engine in Australia.

Google allegedly paid $20 million in March 2021 for Ubisoft ports on Google Stadia. Major game producers like Ubisoft and Take-Two were persuaded to transfer some of their most popular titles to Stadia by Google for “tens of millions of dollars.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in April 2021 that Google had a multi-year effort called “Project Bernanke” that leveraged information from previous advertising bids to give it an edge over rivals bidding for the same services. This was revealed in documents pertaining to the antitrust lawsuit brought against Google by ten US states in December. The Australian government revealed intentions to limit Google’s capacity to sell tailored advertisements in September 2021, alleging that the firm’s market monopoly hurts publishers, advertisers, and consumers.

In 2022, Google started to accept requests to remove contact information from its search results, including phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. Previously, it has only agreed to requests for the deletion of private information, such as Social Security numbers, credit card and bank account numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may still choose to exclude content from some search requests but not others. News articles and other “generally beneficial” content that is already in the public domain would not be removed.

The company announced in May 2022 that it had purchased the California-based startup Raxium, which developed and produced MicroLED display technology. Raxium will work with Google’s Devices and Services team to advance system integration, monolithic integration, and micro-optics.

Chris Peterson, the program manager for Mozilla, said in July 2018 that the company had slowed down YouTube on Firefox on purpose. Former Mozilla executive Jonathan Nightingale charged Google with deliberately and methodically undermining the Firefox browser over the last ten years in order to increase the use of Google Chrome in April 2019.

According to The Intercept, Google was creating a restricted version of its search engine called Dragonfly for the People’s Republic of China that “would block websites and search phrases about human rights, democracy, religion, and nonviolent protest.” However, due to privacy concerns, the initiative had been kept secret.

In the Reddit online community /r/degoogle in 2019, a center for Google haters committed to forgoing the use of Google products came together. As privacy advocates draw attention to information about Google products and the company’s related violations of individuals’ privacy rights, the DeGoogle grassroots movement keeps expanding.

Project Nightingale was the subject of an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Health and Human Services in November 2019 to determine whether the “bulk collecting of individual medical records” was in compliance with HIPAA. The Wall Street Journal claims that Google started the initiative covertly in 2018 with the St. Louis-based healthcare provider Ascension.