knock off bricks called
Mega Bricks.
Beginnings Google has its origins in "
BackRub", a research project started in 1996 by
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at
Stanford University in
Stanford, California. The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", lead programmer
Scott Hassan, who left before Google was officially founded as a company. While finding a topic for his doctoral thesis in 1995, Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the
World Wide Web by understanding its link structure as a huge
graph. His supervisor,
Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"). Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, comparing the importance of tracking such
backlinks to the role of
citations in
academic publishing. Brin and Page also received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
National Security Agency (NSA) to fund the improvement of
intelligence databases on the disorganized World Wide Web. Page's
web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies and laid the foundation for their search engine. The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website and used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google.
Rajeev Motwani and
Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998.
Héctor García-Molina and
Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project.
Late 1990s Originally the search engine used Stanford's website with the domains
google.stanford.edu and
z.stanford.edu. The domain
google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company,
Google, on September 4, 1998, in their friend
Susan Wojcicki's garage in
Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki eventually became an executive at Google and CEO at
YouTube. Page invited
Craig Nevill-Manning, whom he had met while Nevill-Manning was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, to join Google. Nevill-Manning declined and joined years later. Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. They changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads. By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked "
BETA", but an article in
Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like
Hotbot or
Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded
portal sites (like
Yahoo!, Excite.com,
Lycos, Netscape's
Netcenter,
AOL.com,
Go.com and
MSN.com) which, during the growing
dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors. In March 1999, the company moved into offices at
165 University Avenue in
Palo Alto, home to several other noted
Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in
Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from
Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the
Googleplex (a play on the word
googolplex, a number that is equal to 1 followed by a
googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for US$319 million.
2000s The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search
keywords. When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services would later buy
AltaVista, a predecessor search engine to Google, before being bought by
Yahoo! and renamed
Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was then settled out of court; Google agreed to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license. While many of its
dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue. In February 2003, Google acquired
Pyra Labs, owner of the Blogger website. The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine
Google News. In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some
market share, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness. The verb "
to google" has entered a number of languages (first as a
slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a
genericized trademark). After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock price more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004, the number of
shares outstanding was 172.85 million while the "
free float" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by insiders). Google has a dual-class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page said in the
prospectus that Google has "a dual-class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me." In June 2005, Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media companies by stock market value. On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference as
π ≈ 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion. Google said it would use the money for "acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets". With Google's increased size came more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft had been touting its
Bing search engine to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as
webmail (Gmail vs.
Hotmail), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's
Windows Live Local competes with
Google Earth). In addition to an
Internet Explorer replacement, Google designed its own
Linux-based
operating system called
ChromeOS to directly compete with
Microsoft Windows. There were also rumors of a Google
web browser, fueled much by the fact that Google was the owner of the
domain name "gbrowser.com". These were later proven when Google released
Google Chrome. This corporate feud boiled over into the courts when
Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move by citing Lee's
non-compete contract (he had access to much sensitive information regarding Microsoft's plans in
China). Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on December 22, 2005, the terms of which are confidential.
Click fraud also became a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model." While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has experimented with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company
dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. Google also began an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the
Chicago Sun-Times. During the third quarter of 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build." After months of speculation, Google was added to the
Standard & Poor's 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006. Google replaced
Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based in
Houston that had been acquired by
ConocoPhillips. The day after the announcement Google's share price rose by 7%. In 2008, Google launched
Knol, their own equivalent of Wikipedia, which failed four years later.
Use of cookies Although Google was already deriving the vast majority of its income from advertising at the time of its 2004 IPO, it did not use any
HTTP cookie-based
web tracking until 2007. By 2006, Google's Ad revenue was already facing signs of decline, as "a growing number of advertisers were refusing to buy display ads from Google." Google initially separated the browsing habits collected from AD tracking from data collected by its other services by default. Google removed this last layer of protection in 2016, making its tracking personally-identifiable.
2010s In 2011, the company launched
Google+, its fourth foray into social networking, following
Google Buzz (launched 2010, retired in 2011),
Google Friend Connect (launched 2008, retired by March 1, 2012), and
Orkut (launched in 2004, retired in September 2014) As of November 2014, Google operated over 70 offices in more than 41 countries. In 2015, Google reorganized its interests as a holding company,
Alphabet Inc., with Google as its leading subsidiary. Google continued to serve as the umbrella for Alphabet's Internet interests. On September 1, 2017, Google Inc. announced its plans of restructuring as a
limited liability company, Google LLC, as a wholly owned subsidiary of
XXVI Holdings, Inc., which is formed as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. to hold the equity of its other subsidiaries, including Google LLC and other bets. Between 2018 and 2019,
tensions between the company's leadership and its workers escalated 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. On 25 October 2018,
The New York Times published an exposé, "How Google Protected
Andy Rubin, the 'Father of Android'". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct. On 1 November 2018, Google employees staged a global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints, including the
golden parachute exit of former executive
Andy Rubin; more than 20,000 employees and contractors participated. CEO
Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the protests. On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a
cloud gaming platform called
Google Stadia. On June 3, 2019, the
United States Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google for
antitrust violations. This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the
search and
search advertising markets. In December 2019, former
PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready became Google's new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved with
Google Pay.
2020s In April 2020, Google announced several cost-cutting measures due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020, except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and pace of investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel. Google and Apple collaborated on the development of smartphone-based contact tracing solutions to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Prominent examples of government initiatives in this field include Singapore's TraceTogether and Australia's COVID Safe apps. TraceTogether was notably the first national Bluetooth contact tracing app to be launched globally, debuting in March 2020. The
2020 Google services outages disrupted Google services: one in August that affected Google Drive among others, another in November affecting YouTube, and a third in December affecting the entire suite of Google applications. All three outages were resolved within hours. In January 2021, the
Australian Government proposed legislation that would require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their content. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia. In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for
Ubisoft ports on
Google Stadia. Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such as
Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia. In April 2021,
The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called 'Project Bernanke' that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. In June 2023, Google stated it would remove Canadian news links from its services throughout the country due to
legislation from the
Canadian government (Bill C-11) that would require Google and other online platforms such as Facebook to pay for news articles being shown on their platforms. In September 2024, Google and its parent company
Alphabet Inc. were fined 2.42 billion euros by the
European Commission for an antitrust case surrounding Google's shopping service. The decision was later upheld by both the
General Court (European Union) and the
European Court of Justice. In October 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) formally proposed a range of structural and behavioral remedies against Google, including the potential break-up of the company. These proposals explored banning default search placement payments, regulating the use of artificial intelligence in search results, mandating licensing of Google’s search data to competitors, and requiring increased transparency in online ad pricing. In November 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) urged a federal court to impose significant changes on Google to address its monopoly in online search. The proposed measures included forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser, sharing data and search results with competitors, and implementing various other restrictions. The DoJ also sought to prohibit Google from re-entering the browser market for five years, selling its Android OS if needed, and halting investments in rival search engines or AI. It also pushed to end exclusive deals where Google paid device makers like Apple to set its search engine as the default. Google called these measures excessive and harmful for consumers, vowing to appeal and a trial was set for April 2025. In December 2024, Google responded with a counter‑proposal advocating for a narrower, three‑year ban on exclusive default search engine deals, including its long-standing arrangement with Apple. Rather than accepting divestitures of Chrome or Android, Google offered increased flexibility for browser developers and annual renegotiation of default search engine status. Privacy-focused competitors like DuckDuckGo criticized this as inadequate and insufficient to restore market competition. Both parties were expected to submit final remedy proposals ahead of the scheduled remedies trial in April 2025. In early February 2025, Google announced it was ending its targets for minority recruitment and reevaluating other
diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. In April 2025, the remedies trial commenced in Washington, D.C. before Judge Amit P. Mehta. The DOJ argued for substantial structural reforms and ongoing oversight, while Google maintained that such measures were excessive and would hinder innovation in the digital and AI sectors. In September 2025, Mehta ruled that Google would not be required to divest of
Chrome or Android, but could no longer include
search in exclusive contracts. Mehta also ruled that Google would be required to share certain
search index and user interaction data with competitors. In April 2026, Alphabet Google's parent company announced a $180 billion spending plan for the company for AI infrastructure, data centers, and servers. Mainly for the development of Google's AI
Gemini. == Financing and initial public offering ==