Google is a global technology company best known for its search engine, which is the most widely used in the world.
Google’s founders met as graduate students at Stanford University and set out to catalog every page on the internet.
However, in the years since, the multi-billion-dollar juggernaut company’s offerings have expanded greatly, necessitating the creation of its parent company, Alphabet Inc.
Here’s a look at Google’s history and the array of products and services it offers today.
Google’s history
Larry Page is the son of two academics and was enthralled with technology from an early age. A biography of Nikola Tesla that he read at the age of 12 instilled his drive to build something that would change the world. Page did his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and then headed to Stanford to pursue his Ph.D.
Google’s other founder, Sergey Brin, came from much humbler beginnings: He was born in the Soviet Union in August 1973. His father was an economist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist, but he wasn’t able to pursue those dreams due to antisemitism in the USSR. Brin’s family fled to the US when he was 6. Brin earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. from Stanford, where he met Page.
The pair didn’t click at first — they found one another “obnoxious.” But the classmates eventually grew to be close friends who could geek out about computer science together. They also had a shared love for Burning Man, which was the cause for the first Google Doodle (the temporary illustration on the search engine’s homepage let visitors know the founders were out of office).
Brin and Page began working on the search engine that would become Google in 1996, initially calling the project “BackRub.” The google.com domain was officially registered in September 1997, and the company was incorporated in 1998.
In the company’s early days, Brin, Page, and Eric Schmidt, a veteran tech executive, operated as a triumvirate (though Page considered himself CEO). However, Google’s investors felt the company needed more experienced management. As a result, Schmidt became the first official, solo Google CEO in 2001.
Page would again serve as chief executive after learning from Schmidt for 10 years, while Brin served as the president of technology.
Google’s services
Google is, of course, best known for its search engine. At first, Google’s search engine only indexed web pages. But in July 2001, Google Images launched in response to search interest in pictures of a green Versace dress Jennifer Lopez had worn in February 2000.
The tech giant has introduced numerous other internet-based services over the years, with the goal of enriching users’ experience on the web.
An early introduction was Google Adwords (Google Ads, today), which lets brands, businesses, influencers, and other paying customers place advertisements on various surfaces on the internet. The type of ad internet users see, how often it’s served, and the quality of its placement all depend on the user’s behavior and how much the advertiser spent.
Another useful service for business owners is Google Business Profile, previously called Google My Business. This free tool allows entrepreneurs to influence how their company appears in Google search results. It’s especially geared toward small, local establishments.
Many of those businesses may also accept contactless, mobile payments through Google Pay, a secure digital payment platform. Transactions are tokenized and customers’ credit card information is protected behind a passcode or biometrics like a fingerprint or face ID.
Business owners and marketing professionals may also find value in Google Trends, which provides real-time data about Google users’ search interest in billions of people, places, topics, and terms.
If there are particular people or topics you’re interested in keeping tabs on, you can set up Google alerts to stay on top of the latest search results for each.
Google productivity tools
Google has a host of services designed to aid productivity.
Many people use Google Calendar to manage their days, whether at work or personally. The collaborative service allows users to create and manage multiple calendars, which can also be shared with others, ensuring that families, coworkers, and others can stay on top of their daily tasks.
Often used with the calendar program is Google Meet. The video communication app exploded during the pandemic, cementing itself as an essential service for remote workers and long-distance loved ones.
The company’s online learning platform, Google Classroom, became another staple of pandemic life for millions of people worldwide while schools were closed. The system streamlines teachers’ classroom management, allowing them to share announcements, host virtual lessons, distribute learning materials, and more.
Another helpful tool for students is Google Scholar, which provides a simple way to search for academic literature.
Google’s productivity tools make real-time collaboration possible for students and workers alike.
Multiple contributors can work on a presentation simultaneously thanks to Google Slides.
If you need to collect feedback or information from your audience or create a survey, Google Forms is the right tool.
Google Forms creates charts based on respondents’ answers, and you can dig deeper into the data by opening it in Google Sheets. The online spreadsheet editor is useful for calculations, statistical analysis, creating charts, and more.
Fun features
Of course, not all of Google’s tools have such serious uses.
Emoji Kitchen lets you mash together some of your favorite icons to create custom combinations.
Google Doodles add some whimsy to your day by highlighting historical moments and celebrating notable figures and even everyday things like the accordion or chilaquiles. Some of these temporary illustrations have been animated and interactive. Two of the most popular Google games, Snake and Pac-Man, originated as Google Doodles, commemorating the date of the games’ invention.
Travel tools
Some Google tools simplify your travel planning and even help you navigate the real world once you reach your destination.
Travelers find the cheapest airfare by comparing multiple airlines at once with Google Flights. The service even allows you to track prices and book your flight directly, without ever visiting the airline’s website.
Google Street View will give you a view of your destination before you even set foot on the ground. The tech giant deploys a fleet of specially-equipped cars and even backpack-mounted cameras to capture panoramic images of many of the world’s roads, even in some of the most remote, rural areas.
Google Earth takes things even further, allowing you to explore the world in 3D from satellite images. With Google Earth or Street View, you can virtually visit world-famous landmarks without ever leaving your couch.
If you’re traveling to a destination where you don’t speak the primary language, or even if you’ve just landed on a foreign webpage online, Google Translate will be super helpful. The free app supports 133 languages and can interpret text, audio, or images.
Google Lens is another handy tool for exploring the real world. For example, if you’re trying to identify a beautiful plant you came across in your travels, simply point your camera at it and Google will pull up information about it.
Finally, use Google Photos to manage all the pictures you take of your trip and share them with loved ones.
Google AI
Like virtually every other tech company, Google is turning its attention to artificial intelligence. Google’s Gemini AI, formerly known as Bard, is a family of multimodal large language models that can recognize and understand text, images, audio, video, and code to produce human-like responses.
Google’s generative AI launched in December 2023 to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company claims it can help with a variety of tasks ranging from summarizing information to helping with writing to analyzing massive datasets.
Google has been hard at work integrating its Gemini AI into nearly all of its products, from its productivity suite to the actual search engine itself. Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, declared that Google would be an “AI-first company” and said Gemini is “one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company.”
Gemini’s success remains to be seen. At Google I/O 2024, the company’s annual development conference, a demo showed the tech’s integration into a pair of smart glasses. The demo called to mind a failed Google product: Google Glass, a set of smart glasses launched in 2012 and discontinued nearly a decade later. Perhaps the product was just ahead of its time, and Google’s Gemini AI can give it new life.
Google acquisitions
Not all Google products and services have been completely homegrown. The company has made numerous significant acquisitions over the years.
In 2006, Google acquired the video-sharing platform YouTube for $1.65 billion. It’s a major revenue source for the company, with more than 100 million subscribers globally as of early 2024.
Another major purchase came in January 2013: Google bought Waze, the traffic and navigation app, for $1.3 billion. The key difference between Waze and Google’s in-house navigation app, Maps, is that Waze users can report hazards like accidents, impaired vehicles, speed traps, and road closures so the app can adjust the suggested route in real time.
The following year, Google acquired DeepMind, an AI research lab based in London. Google DeepMind is working to create artificial general intelligence, often called AGI, which is different from generative AI products like Gemini, chatGPT, and CoPilot. These generative AI systems can produce human-like responses to a set of specific tasks. By contrast, artificial general intelligence is designed to mimic or even surpass human intelligence for a broader range of tasks.
In 2015, Google restructured and formed a holding company called Alphabet Inc. so Google could narrow its focus and allow these acquired companies to continue operating independently. Some research projects that began their development at Google get spun off as separate subsidiaries of Alphabet, as is the case with Waymo, which began as Google’s Self-Driving Car Project.
Legal challenges
Google’s leading-edge technological advancements and global dominance across so many industries have drawn criticism — and litigation. The company has faced hundreds of high-profile controversies and subsequent lawsuits over privacy, intellectual property, discrimination, advertising, and defamation. Despite being a multibillion-dollar juggernaut, it hasn’t always won.
The most consequential lawsuits Google faces today were brought by the US government over antitrust concerns. One case alleging Google illegally suppressed competition in the search engine industry already went to trial in 2023 but is still awaiting a verdict.
The other case concerns Google’s online advertising strategies and is set to go to trial in September 2024. In that lawsuit, the government claims that Google illegally abused its monopoly over the digital advertising market by acquiring competitors and forcing publishers to adopt Google’s own advertising tools, thereby suppressing the growth of rival technologies.
Google has denied wrongdoing in both cases. Both lawsuits could have massive implications for internet users as well as the company. The internet as we know it could be greatly reshaped by the outcomes of these trials, especially as other major tech juggernauts Amazon, Apple, and Meta face similar litigation.
Also in 2024, a federal jury ordered Google to pay $12 million in damages for infringing on internet voice-calling patents with Google Voice, its service that lets you merge multiple phone numbers into a single number.
Google’s financial history
Google’s IPO took place in August 2004 at an initial share price of $85. Alphabet (Google) stock has undergone three splits in its history, most recently in 2022.
Google’s earnings are reported quarterly. In its most recent earnings report, revenue was up 15% year over year to $80.5 billion. The company also issued its first-ever $0.20 per share dividend.
On the earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai credited the revenue bump to “strong” performance from Google Search, YouTube, and Google Cloud Platform, the company’s pay-as-you-go cloud computing service vendor.
Despite these positive results, tens of thousands have lost jobs as part of Google layoffs in 2023 and 2024, with more job cuts expected. Pichai said in January that the company would continue “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity” in key areas.
Working at Google
Jobs and careers at Google are highly coveted in the tech industry.
Google has long reigned as one of the best companies to work for in the US. The Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, famously boasts luxurious amenities like swimming pools, massage rooms, whimsical art, and more. The company’s other global offices feature similarly plush perks.
It’s quite difficult to become a Google employee, though: Google is notoriously selective when it comes to hiring, and its multi-step process is highly competitive.
