the search engine see google search . for other uses see google disambiguation . google inc. redirects here . for the parent company see alphabet inc. not to be confused with goggle or googol . google inc. googleplex corporate headquarters in 2014 type subsidiary of alphabet inc. industry internet computer software founded september 4 1998 ; 18 years ago 1998 09 04 menlo park california 1 2 founders larry page sergey brin headquarters googleplex mountain view california u.s. 3 area served worldwide key people sundar pichai ceo products list of google products number of employees 57 100 q2 2015 4 parent alphabet inc. 2015 present subsidiaries list of subsidiaries website www.google.com footnotes references 5 google is an american multinational technology company specializing in internet related services and products that include online advertising technologies search cloud computing and software . 7 most of its profits are derived from adwords an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results . 8 9 google was founded 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 . 10 in august 2015 google announced plans to reorganize its interests as a holding company called alphabet inc. when this restructuring took place on october 2 2015 google became alphabet s leading subsidiary as well as the parent for google s internet interests . 11 12 13 14 15 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 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 browser only chrome os 16 for a class of netbooks known as chromebooks and desktop pcs known as chromeboxes . google has moved increasingly into hardware ; from 2010 to 2015 it partnered with major electronics manufacturers 17 in the production of its high quality low cost 18 nexus devices 19 and in october 2016 it launched multiple hardware products the google pixel home wifi and daydream view 20 21 22 23 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 . 24 in 2012 a fiber optic infrastructure was installed in kansas city to facilitate a google fiber broadband service . 25 google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world as of 2007 . 26 it processes over one billion search requests 27 and about 24 petabytes of user generated data each day as of 2009 . 28 29 30 31 in december 2013 alexa listed google.com as the most visited website in the world . numerous google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred as do several other google owned sites such as youtube and blogger . 32 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 . 33 34 35 in october 2015 the motto was replaced in the alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase do the right thing . 36 google s commitment to such robust idealism has been increasingly been called into doubt due to a number of actions and behaviours which appear to contradict this . 37 38 contents 1 history 1.1 financing 1998 and initial public offering 2004 1.2 growth 1.3 2013 onward 1.3.1 push into hardware 1.4 acquisitions and partnerships 1.4.1 2000 2009 1.4.2 2010 2012 1.4.3 2014 2016 1.5 google data centers 1.6 alphabet 2 products and services 2.1 advertising 2.2 search engine 2.3 productivity tools 2.4 enterprise products 2.5 other products 2.6 apis 2.7 other websites 3 corporate affairs and culture 3.1 employees 3.2 office locations and headquarters 3.3 doodles 3.4 easter eggs and april fools day jokes 3.5 atgoogletalks 3.6 codef 3.7 philanthropy 3.8 tax avoidance 3.9 environment 3.10 lobbying 3.11 litigation 4 criticism and controversy 5 see also 6 references 7 further reading 8 external links history main article history of google google s original homepage had a simple design because the company founders were not experienced in html the markup language used for designing web pages . 39 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 stanford california . 40 while conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites . 41 they called this new technology pagerank ; it determined a website s relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site . 42 43 page and brin originally nicknamed their new search engine backrub because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site . 44 45 46 eventually they changed the name to google originating from a misspelling of the word googol 47 48 the number one followed by one hundred zeros which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information . 49 originally google ran under stanford university s website with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu . 50 51 the domain name for google was registered on september 15 1997 52 and the company was incorporated on september 4 1998 . it was based in the garage of a friend susan wojcicki 40 in menlo park california . craig silverstein a fellow phd student at stanford was hired as the first employee . 40 53 54 in may 2011 the number of monthly unique visitors to google surpassed one billion for the first time an 8.4 percent increase from may 2010 931 million . 55 in january 2013 google announced it had earned us 50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012 . this marked the first time the company had reached this feat topping their 2011 total of 38 billion . 56 the company has reported fourth quarter dec 2014 earnings per share eps of 6.88 0.20 under projections . revenue came in at 14.5 billion 16.9 % growth year over year also under expectations by 110 million . 57 financing 1998 and initial public offering 2004 google s first production server . google s production servers continue to be built with inexpensive hardware . 58 the first funding for google was an august 1998 contribution of 100 000 from andy bechtolsheim co founder of sun microsystems given before google was incorporated . 59 early in 1999 while graduate students brin and page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much time and distracting their academic pursuits . they went to excite ceo george bell and offered to sell it to him for 1 million . he rejected the offer and later criticized vinod khosla one of excite s venture capitalists after he negotiated brin and page down to 750 000 . on june 7 1999 a 25 million round of funding was announced 60 with major investors including the venture capital firms kleiner perkins caufield & byers and sequoia capital . 59 google s initial public offering ipo took place five years later on august 19 2004 . at that time larry page sergey brin and eric schmidt agreed to work together at google for 20 years until the year 2024 . 61 the company offered 19 605 052 shares at a price of 85 per share . 62 63 shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by morgan stanley and credit suisse underwriters for the deal . 64 65 the sale of 1.67 bn billion gave google a market capitalization of more than 23bn . 66 by january 2014 its market capitalization had grown to 397bn . 67 the vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of google and many google employees became instant paper millionaires . yahoo a competitor of google also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of google before the ipo took place . 68 there were concerns that google s ipo would lead to changes in company culture . reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires . 69 as a reply to this concern co founders sergey brin and larry page promised in a report to potential investors that the ipo would not change the company s culture . 70 in 2005 articles in the new york times and other sources began suggesting that google had lost its anti corporate no evil philosophy . 71 72 73 74 excessive citations in an effort to maintain the company s unique culture google designated a chief culture officer who also serves as the director of human resources . the purpose of the chief culture officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on a flat organization with a collaborative environment . 75 google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees . 76 77 in 2013 a class action against several silicon valley companies including google was filed for alleged no cold call agreements which restrained the recruitment of high tech employees . 78 the stock performed well after the ipo with shares hitting 350 for the first time on october 31 2007 79 primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market . 80 the surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds . 80 goog shares split into goog class c shares and googl class a shares . 81 the company is listed on the nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbols googl and goog and on the frankfurt stock exchange under the ticker symbol ggq1 . these ticker symbols now refer to alphabet inc. google s holding company since the fourth quarter of 2015 . 82 growth in march 1999 the company moved its offices to palo alto california which is home to several prominent silicon valley technology start ups . 83 the next year against page and brin s initial opposition toward an advertising funded search engine 84 google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords . 40 in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed advertisements were solely text based . keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids and click throughs with bidding starting at five cents per click . 40 this model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by goto.com an idealab spin off created by bill gross . 85 86 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 be bought by yahoo and renamed yahoo search marketing . the case was then settled out of court ; google agreed