Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the American information technology industry, along with Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Google was reorganized as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc..
Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company; Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.
- The name “Google" is actually a wordplay on the mathematical term ‘googol’ which is represented by the number 1 followed by hundred zeroes. The name was chosen because the founders wanted to organise a “seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”
- Google’s founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally planned to name their company ‘Backrub’ after a university research project that the duo began in 1996. The duo chose Backrub as the name for the engine because the program analyzed the web’s backlinks to understand how important a website was or what other sites it was related to. However, the name was later dropped for Google.
- Google owns multiple domain names of the misspelt version of its name such as gooogle.com, goolr.com, gogle.com.
- July 2001 that Google Images were introduced to the world. And behind this new venture was an inspiration from a red-carpet photo of pop star Jennifer Lopez at the 2000 Grammy Awards. Lopez wore a green dress that caught the world’s attention and the Google search engine was flooded with queries about the photo.
- Google’s first office was a rented garage. Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man stick figure. Gmail was launched on April 1, 2004, April Fool’s Day, no joke.
- No matter which part you’re in the Google office, you’re not more than 150 feet away from any kind of food.