Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services

and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software,
and hardware.
Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students
at Stanford University, California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56
percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a
privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August
19, 2004, and Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed
the Googleplex.[6]
In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as
a conglomerate called Alphabet. Google, Alphabet's leading subsidiary, will continue to be the
umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructure,Sundar
Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became CEO of Alphabet.[7][8][9][10]
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships
beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers services designed for work and
productivity (Google Docs, Sheets and Slides), email (Gmail/Inbox), scheduling and time
management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant
messaging and video chat (Google Allo/Duo/Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate),
mapping and turn-by-turn navigation (Google Maps), video-sharing (YouTube), taking notes (Google
Keep), organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and a web browser (Google Chrome). The
company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browseronly Chrome OS. Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered
with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Nexus devices,[11] and in October 2016, it
launched multiple hardware products (the Google Pixel, Home, Wifi, andDaydream View),[12][13][14]
[15]

with new hardware chief Rick Osterloh stating that "a lot of the innovation that we want to do now

ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience".[16] In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure
was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service,[17] and in 2016, the
company launched the Google Station initiative to make public "high-quality, secure, easily
accessible Wi-Fi" around the world, which had already started, and become a success, in India.[18]
Google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world
(as of 2007).[19] It processes over one billion search requests[20] and about 24 petabytes of usergenerated data each day (as of 2009).[21][22][23][24]

Alexa, a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website
in the world.[25] Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited websites,
including YouTube[26] and Blogger.[27] Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world
for 4 consecutive years,[28][29][30] and has a valuation in 2016 at $133 billion.[31]
Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".[32][33][34] In October
2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right
thing".[35] Google's commitment to such robust idealism has been increasingly called into doubt due
to a number of actions and behaviours which appear to contradict this. [36][37]