Google LLC

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 technology companies in the US information technology industry, alongside Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.

Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in 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 California privately held company on September 4, 1998. The company was then reincorporated in Delaware on October 22, 2002. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. The company is Alphabet’s leading subsidiary and will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed as CEO, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, mainly composed of Google employees.

The company’s rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It offers services designed for work and productivity, email, scheduling and time management, cloud storage, instant messaging and video chat, language translation, mapping and navigation, podcast hosting, video sharing, blog publishing, note-taking, and photo organizing and editing. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser.

Google.com is the most visited website worldwide. Several other Google-owned websites also are on the list of most popular websites, including YouTube and Blogger.

Google was the most valuable brand in the world in 2017 (surpassed by Amazon), but has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, antitrust, censorship, and search neutrality.