In the summer of 1998, two Stanford University PhD students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California, into the birthplace of the most powerful search engine in history. They did not start with a billion-dollar valuation or a global empire; they started with a simple idea that conventional search engines were failing to understand the web. While other systems ranked results by counting how many times a search term appeared on a page, Page and Brin theorized that the relationships between websites mattered more. They called this new algorithm PageRank, which determined a website's relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site. This insight allowed them to build a system that could make sense of the chaotic internet, but they needed money to turn their theory into reality. An August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, provided the necessary capital to incorporate the company. Bechtolsheim had agreed to write the check after a brief meeting at the front porch of David Cheriton's home, where he tested a demo of the website and liked what he saw before rushing back to his car to grab the check. The founders initially named the project BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site, but they soon changed the name to Google, a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written 10 to the power of 100, to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. The company received additional funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and entrepreneur Ram Shriram, who had invested $250,000 in February 1998, bringing the total initial funding to around $1,000,000. This capital allowed them to open their original shop in Menlo Park and hire Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student, as the first employee. The early days were defined by a scrappy, unpolished aesthetic, with the original homepage featuring a simplistic design because the founders had little experience in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages. The project also 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 initial team also included Alan Steremberg, Rajeev Motwani, Terry Winograd, Héctor García-Molina, and Jeffrey Ullman, who were cited as critical contributors to the development of the search engine. The first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, was co-authored by Motwani and Winograd with Page and Brin and published in 1998. The name Google was chosen because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10 to the power of 100, and fits well with their goal of building very large-scale search engines. The company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, in March 1999, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi. In 2001, Google's investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google. Schmidt was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even menaced requesting Google to immediately pay back Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive officer, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Schmidt agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his commitment and to provide funds Google needed. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million. By that time, the name Google had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb google to be added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet. The first use of the verb on television appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The Public Market And The Search For Control
On the 19th of August 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public offering, marking a pivotal moment in the company's history. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on the 31st of October 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. GOOG shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares. 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. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, a move that would eventually make YouTube the second most-visited website worldwide. On the 20th of July 2007, Google bids $4.6 billion for the wireless-spectrum auction by the FCC. On the 11th of March 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies, mainly Apple and Microsoft, and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android. In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million. While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service. Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on the 19th of September 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official public statement, Page explained that the health and well-being company would focus on the challenge of ageing and associated diseases. On the 26th of January 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the price. The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in the AI and robotics community. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go. According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion. On the 10th of August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Page, who became CEO of Alphabet. On the 8th of August 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company that argued bias and Google's Ideological Echo Chamber clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions. The New York Times, the 7th of August 2017. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace, and he was fired on the same day. 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 the 25th of October 2018, The New York Times published the 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 the 1st of November 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints. CEO Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the protests. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. On the 19th of March 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia. On the 3rd of June 2019, the U.S. 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. In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. 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. Most employees were also working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home. 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 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees. 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 for ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries. It would not remove content that is broadly useful, such as news articles, or already part of the public record. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. Raxium is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the development of micro-optics, monolithic integration, and system integration. In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a code red and a directive that all of its most important products, those with more than a billion users, must incorporate generative AI within months. In March 2023, in direct response to the rapid rise of ChatGPT, Google released Bard (now Gemini), a generative artificial intelligence chatbot. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company's tools, including AI technology. The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google's total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search. D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit Mehta held that this monopoly was in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine. The EU Court of Justice found that Google's treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as discriminatory, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In October 2024, Google was fined by a local Russian court a symbolic 2.5 decillion dollars for allegedly blocking pro-Kremlin propaganda. No payment was made. In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom's economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia's economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region's specific needs and training local talent. The partnership between Google and Saudi Arabia includes collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the Public Investment Fund (PIF), to develop AI applications that will benefit sectors like healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and logistics. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. This cash deal would be Google's biggest ever, as well as it currently being the most expensive deal of 2025. Alphabet reportedly tried to close a deal for only $23 billion in 2024, but this fell apart after concerns about regulatory hurdles, among other issues. Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. The company is backed by a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, as well as notably being partnered with Amazon and Microsoft, as listed in their website. Google reportedly said the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. In September 2025, federal judge Amit Mehta in the United States ruled that Google will not be required to divest Chrome or the Android operating system; however, the ruling barred Google from having exclusive contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and Gemini app products, and ruled Google must share search data with competitors.The Architecture Of A Digital Empire
Google generates most of its revenues from advertising, which includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. Forty-six percent of this profit was from clicks, amounting to US$109,652 million in 2017. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense, such as AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, etc., and DoubleClick AdExchange. In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history. In 2007, Google launched AdSense for Mobile, taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google Ads allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on advertisements without being interested in the product, causing the advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid. Google Search Console, rebranded from Google Webmaster Tools in May 2015, allows webmasters to check the sitemap, crawl rate, and for security issues of their websites, as well as optimize their website's visibility. Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators. According to comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. In May 2017, Google enabled a new Personal tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos. Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. Google expanded its search services to include shopping, launched originally as Froogle in 2002, finance, launched 2006, and flights, launched 2011. Google offers Gmail for email, Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling, Google Maps and Google Earth for mapping, navigation and satellite imagery, Google Drive for cloud storage of files, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for productivity, Google Photos for photo storage and sharing, Google Keep for note-taking, Google Translate for language translation, YouTube for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for managing public business information, Google Classroom for managing assignments and communication in education, and Duo for social interaction. A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites. Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers. Google develops the Android mobile operating system, as well as its smartwatch, television, car, and Internet of things-enabled smart devices variations. It also develops the Google Chrome web browser, ChromeOS, an operating system based on Chrome, and the AI-powered integrated development environment Google Antigravity. In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand. It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the Nexus branding until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called Pixel. In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, which runs on ChromeOS. In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions. In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets the user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality, VR, media. In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media. Other hardware products include: Nest, a series of voice assistant smart speakers that can answer voice queries, play music, find information from apps, calendar, weather etc., and control third-party smart home appliances, users can tell it to turn on the lights, for example. The Google Nest line includes the original Google Home, later succeeded by the Nest Audio, the Google Home Mini, later succeeded by the Nest Mini, the Google Home Max, the Google Home Hub, later rebranded as the Nest Hub, and the Nest Hub Max. Nest Wifi, originally Google Wifi, a connected set of Wi-Fi routers to simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi. Google Workspace, formerly G Suite until October 2020, is a monthly subscription offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a collection of Google's services, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names, and 24/7 support. On the 24th of September 2012, Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships. There are seven Campus locations: Berlin, London, Madrid, Seoul, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. On the 15th of March 2016, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers, which can be integrated with BigQuery on the Google Cloud Platform. Among other things, the suite is designed to help enterprise class marketers see the complete customer journey, generate useful insights, and deliver engaging experiences to the right people. Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM. In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division. In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal. In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets. Google has data centers in North and South America, Asia, and Europe. There is no official data on the number of servers in Google data centers; however, research and advisory firm Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. Traditionally, Google relied on parallel computing on commodity hardware like mainstream x86 computers, similar to home PCs, to keep costs per query low. In 2005, it started developing its own designs, which were only revealed in 2009. Google has built its own private submarine communications cables. The first cable, named Curie, connects California with Chile and was completed on the 15th of November 2019. The second fully Google-owned undersea cable, named Dunant, connects the United States with France and is planned to begin operation in 2020. Google's third subsea cable, Equiano, will connect Lisbon, Portugal, with Lagos, Nigeria, and Cape Town, South Africa. The company's fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York, US, Bude, UK, and Bilbao, Spain, and is expected to become operational in 2022. Google has over 78 offices in more than 50 countries. In 2006, Google moved into about of office space at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. The office houses its largest advertising sales team. In 2010, Google bought the building housing the headquarters, in a deal that valued the property at around $1.9 billion. In March 2018, Google's parent company Alphabet bought the nearby Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion. The sale is touted as one of the most expensive real estate transactions for a single building in the history of New York. In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan's Hudson Square neighborhood. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City. By late 2006, Google established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs. Other office locations in the U.S. include Atlanta; Austin; Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco; Seattle and Kirkland, Washington; Birmingham, Michigan; Reston, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin. It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney, birthplace location of Google Maps, and London, part of Android development. In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions at the time of the deal's announcement in January, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017. In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. The new campus, reported to be the company's largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In September 2025 Google opened their £735m AI Centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and announced their plans for £5 bn investment in AI research, in the same month that Alphabet reached market capitalisation of $3 trillion. Google's Global Offices sum a total of 86 locations worldwide, with 32 offices in North America, three of them in Canada and 29 in the United States, California being the state with the most Google's offices with 9 in total including the Googleplex. Google counts 6 offices in the Latin America region and 24 in Europe, 3 of them in United Kingdom. The Asia-Pacific region counts with 26 offices principally five in India and three in Australia, and three in China, while the Africa and Middle East region counts five offices.The Cost Of Organizing Information
Google has faced significant criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy. Other criticisms are alleged misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of other people's intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate Internet privacy, and the energy consumption of its servers, as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, anti-competitive practices, and patent infringement. Google uses various tax avoidance strategies. On the list of largest technology companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues. Google between 2007 and 2010 saved $3.1 billion in taxes by shuttling non-U.S. profits through Ireland and the Netherlands and then to Bermuda. Such techniques lower its non-U.S. tax rate to 2.3 per cent, while normally the corporate tax rate in, for instance, the UK is 28 per cent. This reportedly sparked a French investigation into Google's transfer pricing practices in 2012. In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its controversial global tax structure and consolidated all of its intellectual property holdings back to the U.S. Google Vice-president Matt Brittin testified to the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons that his UK sales team made no sales and hence owed no sales taxes to the UK. In January 2016, Google reached a settlement with the UK to pay £130m in back taxes plus higher taxes in future. In 2017, Google channeled $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda to reduce its tax bill. In 2013, Google ranked 5th in lobbying spending, up from 213th in 2003. In 2012, the company ranked 2nd in campaign donations of technology and Internet sections. In 2025, Google was one of the donors who funded the White House's East Wing demolition, and planned building of a ballroom. In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project, Project Vivian, to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions. On the 1st of May 2023, Google placed an ad against the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630, an anti-disinformation law that was about to be approved, on its search homepage in Brazil, calling on its users to ask congressional representatives to oppose the legislation. The country's government and judiciary accused the company of undue interference in the congressional debate, saying it could amount to abuse of economic power and ordering the company to change the ad within two hours of notification or face fines of per non-compliance hour. The company then promptly removed the ad. Google has a US$1.2 billion artificial intelligence and surveillance contract with the Israeli military known as Project Nimbus. According to Google employees, the Israeli military could use this technology to expand its surveillance of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Google relocated an outspoken employee overseas, and the employee claimed it was a retaliation for publicly criticizing the contract. Other Palestinian employees have described an institutionalised bias within the company. In 2021, Google and Amazon engaged in negotiations for a substantial cloud computing agreement valued at $1.2 billion, during which Israel insisted on the inclusion of a confidential code referred to as the blink mechanism. This stipulation compelled Google and Amazon to essentially disregard legal responsibilities in various nations. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. As per documents disclosed to The Guardian, both Google and Amazon consented to the blink mechanism in order to finalize the profitable agreement. During 2025, Google engaged in a $45 million, six-month contract with Israel to run advertising campaigns. Some Youtube ads aimed to cast doubt on the existence of a famine in Gaza. Many complaints were filed against Israel's videos, but Google maintained that the ads did not violate its content policies. On the 31st of October 2024, the Russian government imposed a symbolic fine of $20 decillion on Google for blocking pro-Russian YouTube channels. In 2022, during the invasion of Ukraine, a Russian court had ordered Google to restore the channels, with penalties doubling every week according to TASS. This comes alongside other large fines against social media companies accused of hosting content critical of the Kremlin or supportive of Ukraine. When Google's parent company Alphabet announced in September 2025 that it would reinstate YouTube creators that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, it was criticized for prioritizing free expression over facts and placed within the context of the company's shift dating back to 2023. In July 2018, Mozilla program manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. In April 2019, former Mozilla executive Jonathan Nightingale accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging the Firefox browser over the past decade in order to boost adoption of Google Chrome. In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. The DeGoogle grassroots campaign continues to grow as privacy activists highlight information about Google products, and the associated incursion on personal privacy rights by the company. Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari. It marks one of the largest payments between two tech giants in recent years. On the 27th of June 2017, the company received a record fine of from the European Union, EU, for promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results. On the 18th of July 2018, the European Commissioner for Competition fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On the 9th of October 2018, Google confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court of the EU. On the 20th of March 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion, $1.69 billion, fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to compete and innovate fairly in the online advertising market. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites that required them to exclude search results from Google's rivals. On the 14th of September 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion, £3.5 billion, fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google's search and web browser apps. Since the initial accusations, Google has changed its policy. In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019. Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach. On the 10th of September 2024, Europe's top court imposed a €2.4 billion fine on Google for abusing its dominance in the shopping comparison market, marking the conclusion of a case that began in 2009 with a complaint from British firm Foundem. On the 18th of September 2024, Alphabet's Google won a €1.49 billion, $1.7 billion, antitrust fine from the EU, while Qualcomm's efforts to repeal a penalty were unsuccessful. The General Court agreed with many of the European Commission's findings but annulled the Google fine, stating that the Commission failed to consider all relevant factors and did not demonstrate harm to innovation or consumers. Google noted that it had already changed its contract practices in 2016. Meanwhile, Qualcomm saw its fine reduced slightly but failed to overturn the ruling regarding its predatory pricing against Icera. Both companies have options to appeal further. On the 5th of September 2025, the European Commission fined Google €2.95 billion, $3.47 billion, for breaching EU antitrust rules. Regulators say Google abused its dominance by giving preferential treatment to its ad exchange within its publisher ad server and ad-buying tools. After U.S. Congressional hearings in July 2020, and a report from the U.S. House of Representatives' Antitrust Subcommittee released in early October, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on the 20th of October 2020, asserting that it has illegally maintained its monopoly position in web search and search advertising. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to cooperate and assist one another in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. In August 2024, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held a monopoly in online search and text advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. On the 8th of October 2024, The U.S. government suggested it could request Google to divest parts of its business, such as the Chrome browser and Android, due to its alleged monopoly in online search. The Justice Department aimed to limit Google's growing dominance in areas like AI. Google, which intended to appeal, argued that the proposals were too extreme. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system is the largest rooftop photovoltaic power station constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. Google has aimed for carbon neutrality in regard to its operations. In Spring 2009, Google hired a herd of 200 goats for a week from California Grazing to mow their lawn. It was apparently more eco-friendly. Google disclosed in September 2011 that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, almost 260 million watts or about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. Google said that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels in 2010. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The corporation exercised this authorization in September 2013 when it announced it would purchase all the electricity produced by the not-yet-built 240-megawatt Happy Hereford wind farm. In July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of power for 20 years. In December 2016, Google announced that, starting in 2017, it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices. The commitment will make Google the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts, 2,600 megawatts, of wind and solar energy. In November 2017, Google bought 536 megawatts of wind power. The purchase made the firm reach 100% renewable energy. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma. In September 2019, Google's chief executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said. In September 2020, Google announced it had retroactively offset all of its carbon emissions since the company's foundation in 1998. It also stated that it is committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. It also said that all its final assembly manufacturing sites will achieve a UL 2799 Zero Waste to Landfill certification by 2022 by ensuring that the vast majority of waste from the manufacturing process is recycled instead of ending up in a landfill. In 2023 Google consumed 24 TWh of electricity, more than countries such as Iceland, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, or Tunisia.The Culture Of Innovation And Control
Google's corporate philosophy includes principles such as you can make money without doing evil, you can be serious without a suit, and work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. Google's diversity report states that 32 percent of its workforce are women and 68 percent are men, with the ethnicity of its workforce being predominantly white, 51.7%, and Asian, 41.9%. Within tech roles, 23.6 percent were women; and 26.7 percent of leadership roles were held by women. In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, Google's employees are hired based on a hierarchical system. Employees are split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range from entry-level data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level six. As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy known as Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of Search Products and User Experience until July 2012, showed that half of all new product launches in the second half of 2005 had originated from the Innovation Time Off. In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer whose purpose was to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on. Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees. 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. In a lawsuit filed the 8th of January 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against a class defined by their conservative political views, male gender, and/or Caucasian or Asian race. On the 25th of January 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced. The coalition is made up of 13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. The group is affiliated with the UNI Global Union, which represents nearly 20 million international workers from various unions and federations. The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture. Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. In 2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian to convince them employees that unions suck. In February 2025, Google dropped their commitment to make diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, part of everything we do from their annual investor report. This action followed Meta, Amazon, Pepsi, McDonald's, Walmart, and others who all have rolled back their DEI programmes. The original Google logo was designed by Sergey Brin. Google has been designing special, temporary alternate logos to place on their homepage intended to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people. The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed Doodlers. Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on the 1st of April 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet. Google's services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef's Bork bork bork, Pig Latin, Hacker or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine. When searching for the word anagram, meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form other valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays Did you mean: nag a ram? Since 2019, Google runs free online courses to help engineers learn how to plan and author technical documentation better. In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion. The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004 and Megan Smith has replaced him as director. In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, MSRI, Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at Google was the founding of this event for middle school and high school students. In 2011, Google donated €1 million to International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International Mathematical Olympiads, 2011, 2015. In July 2012, Google launched a Legalize Love campaign in support of gay rights. In 2008, Google announced its project 10100, which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites. After two years of no update, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a website that intends to make all legal documents public and online. Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees. Also in February 2022, Google announced a $100 million fund to expand skills training and job placement for low-income Americans, in conjunction with non-profits Year Up, Social Finance, and Merit America. On Fortune magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012, and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index. 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 is Don't be evil. In October 2015, a related motto was adopted in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: Do the right thing. The original motto was retained in the code of conduct of Google, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. In January 2013, then-CEO Larry Page commented, We ended 2012 with a strong quarter ... Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year , not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. Google's consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2013 was reported in mid-October 2013 as $14.89 billion, a 12 percent increase compared to the previous quarter. Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. By January 2014, Google's market capitalization had grown to $397 billion. In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. From the financial year of 2015, figures are published for Alphabet Inc. Until 2014, the key trends of Google were as follows: 1999 revenue 0.22 million USD, net income -6.02 million USD, employees 2000; 2000 revenue 19.1 million USD, net income -14.6 million USD, employees 2000; 2001 revenue 86.4 million USD, net income 6.9 million USD, employees 2842; 2002 revenue 439 million USD, net income 99.6 million USD, employees 682; 2003 revenue 1.4 billion USD, net income 0.10 billion USD, employees 1,628; 2004 revenue 3.1 billion USD, net income 0.39 billion USD, employees 3,021; 2005 revenue 6.1 billion USD, net income 1.4 billion USD, employees 5,680; 2006 revenue 10.6 billion USD, net income 3.0 billion USD, employees 10,674; 2007 revenue 16.5 billion USD, net income 4.2 billion USD, employees 16,805; 2008 revenue 21.8 billion USD, net income 4.2 billion USD, employees 20,222; 2009 revenue 23.6 billion USD, net income 6.5 billion USD, employees 19,835; 2010 revenue 29.3 billion USD, net income 8.5 billion USD, employees 24,400; 2011 revenue 37.9 billion USD, net income 9.7 billion USD, employees 32,467; 2012 revenue 46.0 billion USD, net income 10.7 billion USD, employees 53,861; 2013 revenue 55.5 billion USD, net income 12.7 billion USD, employees 47,756; 2014 revenue 66.0 billion USD, net income 14.1 billion USD, employees 53,600. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go. According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees. 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 for ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries. It would not remove content that is broadly useful, such as news articles, or already part of the public record. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. Raxium is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the development of micro-optics, monolithic integration, and system integration. In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a code red and a directive that all of its most important products, those with more than a billion users, must incorporate generative AI within months. In March 2023, in direct response to the rapid rise of ChatGPT, Google released Bard (now Gemini), a generative artificial intelligence chatbot. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company's tools, including AI technology. The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google's total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search. D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit Mehta held that this monopoly was in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union, EU, based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine. The EU Court of Justice found that Google's treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as discriminatory, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In October 2024, Google was fined by a local Russian court a symbolic 2.5 decillion dollars for allegedly blocking pro-Kremlin propaganda. No payment was made. In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom's economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia's economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region's specific needs and training local talent. The partnership between Google and Saudi Arabia includes collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the Public Investment Fund, PIF, to develop AI applications that will benefit sectors like healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and logistics. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. This cash deal would be Google's biggest ever, as well as it currently being the most expensive deal of 2025. Alphabet reportedly tried to close a deal for only $23 billion in 2024, but this fell apart after concerns about regulatory hurdles, among other issues. Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. The company is backed by a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, as well as notably being partnered with Amazon and Microsoft, as listed in their website. Google reportedly said the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. In September 2025, federal judge Amit Mehta in the United States ruled that Google will not be required to divest Chrome or the Android operating system; however, the ruling barred Google from having exclusive contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and Gemini app products, and ruled Google must share search data with competitors.In the summer of 1998, two Stanford University PhD students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California, into the birthplace of the most powerful search engine in history. They did not start with a billion-dollar valuation or a global empire; they started with a simple idea that conventional search engines were failing to understand the web. While other systems ranked results by counting how many times a search term appeared on a page, Page and Brin theorized that the relationships between websites mattered more. They called this new algorithm PageRank, which determined a website's relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site. This insight allowed them to build a system that could make sense of the chaotic internet, but they needed money to turn their theory into reality. An August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, provided the necessary capital to incorporate the company. Bechtolsheim had agreed to write the check after a brief meeting at the front porch of David Cheriton's home, where he tested a demo of the website and liked what he saw before rushing back to his car to grab the check. The founders initially named the project BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site, but they soon changed the name to Google, a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written 10 to the power of 100, to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. The company received additional funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and entrepreneur Ram Shriram, who had invested $250,000 in February 1998, bringing the total initial funding to around $1,000,000. This capital allowed them to open their original shop in Menlo Park and hire Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student, as the first employee. The early days were defined by a scrappy, unpolished aesthetic, with the original homepage featuring a simplistic design because the founders had little experience in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages. The project also 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 initial team also included Alan Steremberg, Rajeev Motwani, Terry Winograd, Héctor García-Molina, and Jeffrey Ullman, who were cited as critical contributors to the development of the search engine. The first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, was co-authored by Motwani and Winograd with Page and Brin and published in 1998. The name Google was chosen because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10 to the power of 100, and fits well with their goal of building very large-scale search engines. The company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, in March 1999, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi. In 2001, Google's investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google. Schmidt was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even menaced requesting Google to immediately pay back Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive officer, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Schmidt agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his commitment and to provide funds Google needed. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million. By that time, the name Google had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb google to be added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet. The first use of the verb on television appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The Public Market And The Search For Control
On the 19th of August 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public offering, marking a pivotal moment in the company's history. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on the 31st of October 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. GOOG shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares. 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. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, a move that would eventually make YouTube the second most-visited website worldwide. On the 20th of July 2007, Google bids $4.6 billion for the wireless-spectrum auction by the FCC. On the 11th of March 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies, mainly Apple and Microsoft, and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android. In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million. While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service. Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on the 19th of September 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official public statement, Page explained that the health and well-being company would focus on the challenge of ageing and associated diseases. On the 26th of January 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the price. The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in the AI and robotics community. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go. According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion. On the 10th of August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Page, who became CEO of Alphabet. On the 8th of August 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company that argued bias and Google's Ideological Echo Chamber clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions. The New York Times, the 7th of August 2017. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace, and he was fired on the same day. 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 the 25th of October 2018, The New York Times published the 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 the 1st of November 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints. CEO Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the protests. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. On the 19th of March 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia. On the 3rd of June 2019, the U.S. 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. In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. 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. Most employees were also working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home. 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 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees. 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 for ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries. It would not remove content that is broadly useful, such as news articles, or already part of the public record. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. Raxium is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the development of micro-optics, monolithic integration, and system integration. In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a code red and a directive that all of its most important products, those with more than a billion users, must incorporate generative AI within months. In March 2023, in direct response to the rapid rise of ChatGPT, Google released Bard (now Gemini), a generative artificial intelligence chatbot. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company's tools, including AI technology. The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google's total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search. D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit Mehta held that this monopoly was in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine. The EU Court of Justice found that Google's treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as discriminatory, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In October 2024, Google was fined by a local Russian court a symbolic 2.5 decillion dollars for allegedly blocking pro-Kremlin propaganda. No payment was made. In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom's economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia's economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region's specific needs and training local talent. The partnership between Google and Saudi Arabia includes collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the Public Investment Fund (PIF), to develop AI applications that will benefit sectors like healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and logistics. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. This cash deal would be Google's biggest ever, as well as it currently being the most expensive deal of 2025. Alphabet reportedly tried to close a deal for only $23 billion in 2024, but this fell apart after concerns about regulatory hurdles, among other issues. Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. The company is backed by a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, as well as notably being partnered with Amazon and Microsoft, as listed in their website. Google reportedly said the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. In September 2025, federal judge Amit Mehta in the United States ruled that Google will not be required to divest Chrome or the Android operating system; however, the ruling barred Google from having exclusive contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and Gemini app products, and ruled Google must share search data with competitors.
The Architecture Of A Digital Empire
Google generates most of its revenues from advertising, which includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. Forty-six percent of this profit was from clicks, amounting to US$109,652 million in 2017. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense, such as AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, etc., and DoubleClick AdExchange. In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history. In 2007, Google launched AdSense for Mobile, taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google Ads allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on advertisements without being interested in the product, causing the advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid. Google Search Console, rebranded from Google Webmaster Tools in May 2015, allows webmasters to check the sitemap, crawl rate, and for security issues of their websites, as well as optimize their website's visibility. Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators. According to comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. In May 2017, Google enabled a new Personal tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos. Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. Google expanded its search services to include shopping, launched originally as Froogle in 2002, finance, launched 2006, and flights, launched 2011. Google offers Gmail for email, Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling, Google Maps and Google Earth for mapping, navigation and satellite imagery, Google Drive for cloud storage of files, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for productivity, Google Photos for photo storage and sharing, Google Keep for note-taking, Google Translate for language translation, YouTube for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for managing public business information, Google Classroom for managing assignments and communication in education, and Duo for social interaction. A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites. Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers. Google develops the Android mobile operating system, as well as its smartwatch, television, car, and Internet of things-enabled smart devices variations. It also develops the Google Chrome web browser, ChromeOS, an operating system based on Chrome, and the AI-powered integrated development environment Google Antigravity. In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand. It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the Nexus branding until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called Pixel. In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, which runs on ChromeOS. In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions. In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets the user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality, VR, media. In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media. Other hardware products include: Nest, a series of voice assistant smart speakers that can answer voice queries, play music, find information from apps, calendar, weather etc., and control third-party smart home appliances, users can tell it to turn on the lights, for example. The Google Nest line includes the original Google Home, later succeeded by the Nest Audio, the Google Home Mini, later succeeded by the Nest Mini, the Google Home Max, the Google Home Hub, later rebranded as the Nest Hub, and the Nest Hub Max. Nest Wifi, originally Google Wifi, a connected set of Wi-Fi routers to simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi. Google Workspace, formerly G Suite until October 2020, is a monthly subscription offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a collection of Google's services, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names, and 24/7 support. On the 24th of September 2012, Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships. There are seven Campus locations: Berlin, London, Madrid, Seoul, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. On the 15th of March 2016, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers, which can be integrated with BigQuery on the Google Cloud Platform. Among other things, the suite is designed to help enterprise class marketers see the complete customer journey, generate useful insights, and deliver engaging experiences to the right people. Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM. In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division. In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal. In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets. Google has data centers in North and South America, Asia, and Europe. There is no official data on the number of servers in Google data centers; however, research and advisory firm Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. Traditionally, Google relied on parallel computing on commodity hardware like mainstream x86 computers, similar to home PCs, to keep costs per query low. In 2005, it started developing its own designs, which were only revealed in 2009. Google has built its own private submarine communications cables. The first cable, named Curie, connects California with Chile and was completed on the 15th of November 2019. The second fully Google-owned undersea cable, named Dunant, connects the United States with France and is planned to begin operation in 2020. Google's third subsea cable, Equiano, will connect Lisbon, Portugal, with Lagos, Nigeria, and Cape Town, South Africa. The company's fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York, US, Bude, UK, and Bilbao, Spain, and is expected to become operational in 2022. Google has over 78 offices in more than 50 countries. In 2006, Google moved into about of office space at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. The office houses its largest advertising sales team. In 2010, Google bought the building housing the headquarters, in a deal that valued the property at around $1.9 billion. In March 2018, Google's parent company Alphabet bought the nearby Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion. The sale is touted as one of the most expensive real estate transactions for a single building in the history of New York. In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan's Hudson Square neighborhood. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City. By late 2006, Google established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs. Other office locations in the U.S. include Atlanta; Austin; Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco; Seattle and Kirkland, Washington; Birmingham, Michigan; Reston, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin. It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney, birthplace location of Google Maps, and London, part of Android development. In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions at the time of the deal's announcement in January, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017. In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. The new campus, reported to be the company's largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In September 2025 Google opened their £735m AI Centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and announced their plans for £5 bn investment in AI research, in the same month that Alphabet reached market capitalisation of $3 trillion. Google's Global Offices sum a total of 86 locations worldwide, with 32 offices in North America, three of them in Canada and 29 in the United States, California being the state with the most Google's offices with 9 in total including the Googleplex. Google counts 6 offices in the Latin America region and 24 in Europe, 3 of them in United Kingdom. The Asia-Pacific region counts with 26 offices principally five in India and three in Australia, and three in China, while the Africa and Middle East region counts five offices.
The Cost Of Organizing Information
Google has faced significant criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy. Other criticisms are alleged misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of other people's intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate Internet privacy, and the energy consumption of its servers, as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, anti-competitive practices, and patent infringement. Google uses various tax avoidance strategies. On the list of largest technology companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues. Google between 2007 and 2010 saved $3.1 billion in taxes by shuttling non-U.S. profits through Ireland and the Netherlands and then to Bermuda. Such techniques lower its non-U.S. tax rate to 2.3 per cent, while normally the corporate tax rate in, for instance, the UK is 28 per cent. This reportedly sparked a French investigation into Google's transfer pricing practices in 2012. In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its controversial global tax structure and consolidated all of its intellectual property holdings back to the U.S. Google Vice-president Matt Brittin testified to the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons that his UK sales team made no sales and hence owed no sales taxes to the UK. In January 2016, Google reached a settlement with the UK to pay £130m in back taxes plus higher taxes in future. In 2017, Google channeled $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda to reduce its tax bill. In 2013, Google ranked 5th in lobbying spending, up from 213th in 2003. In 2012, the company ranked 2nd in campaign donations of technology and Internet sections. In 2025, Google was one of the donors who funded the White House's East Wing demolition, and planned building of a ballroom. In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project, Project Vivian, to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions. On the 1st of May 2023, Google placed an ad against the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630, an anti-disinformation law that was about to be approved, on its search homepage in Brazil, calling on its users to ask congressional representatives to oppose the legislation. The country's government and judiciary accused the company of undue interference in the congressional debate, saying it could amount to abuse of economic power and ordering the company to change the ad within two hours of notification or face fines of per non-compliance hour. The company then promptly removed the ad. Google has a US$1.2 billion artificial intelligence and surveillance contract with the Israeli military known as Project Nimbus. According to Google employees, the Israeli military could use this technology to expand its surveillance of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Google relocated an outspoken employee overseas, and the employee claimed it was a retaliation for publicly criticizing the contract. Other Palestinian employees have described an institutionalised bias within the company. In 2021, Google and Amazon engaged in negotiations for a substantial cloud computing agreement valued at $1.2 billion, during which Israel insisted on the inclusion of a confidential code referred to as the blink mechanism. This stipulation compelled Google and Amazon to essentially disregard legal responsibilities in various nations. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. As per documents disclosed to The Guardian, both Google and Amazon consented to the blink mechanism in order to finalize the profitable agreement. During 2025, Google engaged in a $45 million, six-month contract with Israel to run advertising campaigns. Some Youtube ads aimed to cast doubt on the existence of a famine in Gaza. Many complaints were filed against Israel's videos, but Google maintained that the ads did not violate its content policies. On the 31st of October 2024, the Russian government imposed a symbolic fine of $20 decillion on Google for blocking pro-Russian YouTube channels. In 2022, during the invasion of Ukraine, a Russian court had ordered Google to restore the channels, with penalties doubling every week according to TASS. This comes alongside other large fines against social media companies accused of hosting content critical of the Kremlin or supportive of Ukraine. When Google's parent company Alphabet announced in September 2025 that it would reinstate YouTube creators that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, it was criticized for prioritizing free expression over facts and placed within the context of the company's shift dating back to 2023. In July 2018, Mozilla program manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox. In April 2019, former Mozilla executive Jonathan Nightingale accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging the Firefox browser over the past decade in order to boost adoption of Google Chrome. In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. The DeGoogle grassroots campaign continues to grow as privacy activists highlight information about Google products, and the associated incursion on personal privacy rights by the company. Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari. It marks one of the largest payments between two tech giants in recent years. On the 27th of June 2017, the company received a record fine of from the European Union, EU, for promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results. On the 18th of July 2018, the European Commissioner for Competition fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On the 9th of October 2018, Google confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court of the EU. On the 20th of March 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion, $1.69 billion, fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to compete and innovate fairly in the online advertising market. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites that required them to exclude search results from Google's rivals. On the 14th of September 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion, £3.5 billion, fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google's search and web browser apps. Since the initial accusations, Google has changed its policy. In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019. Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach. On the 10th of September 2024, Europe's top court imposed a €2.4 billion fine on Google for abusing its dominance in the shopping comparison market, marking the conclusion of a case that began in 2009 with a complaint from British firm Foundem. On the 18th of September 2024, Alphabet's Google won a €1.49 billion, $1.7 billion, antitrust fine from the EU, while Qualcomm's efforts to repeal a penalty were unsuccessful. The General Court agreed with many of the European Commission's findings but annulled the Google fine, stating that the Commission failed to consider all relevant factors and did not demonstrate harm to innovation or consumers. Google noted that it had already changed its contract practices in 2016. Meanwhile, Qualcomm saw its fine reduced slightly but failed to overturn the ruling regarding its predatory pricing against Icera. Both companies have options to appeal further. On the 5th of September 2025, the European Commission fined Google €2.95 billion, $3.47 billion, for breaching EU antitrust rules. Regulators say Google abused its dominance by giving preferential treatment to its ad exchange within its publisher ad server and ad-buying tools. After U.S. Congressional hearings in July 2020, and a report from the U.S. House of Representatives' Antitrust Subcommittee released in early October, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on the 20th of October 2020, asserting that it has illegally maintained its monopoly position in web search and search advertising. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to cooperate and assist one another in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. In August 2024, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held a monopoly in online search and text advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. On the 8th of October 2024, The U.S. government suggested it could request Google to divest parts of its business, such as the Chrome browser and Android, due to its alleged monopoly in online search. The Justice Department aimed to limit Google's growing dominance in areas like AI. Google, which intended to appeal, argued that the proposals were too extreme. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system is the largest rooftop photovoltaic power station constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. Google has aimed for carbon neutrality in regard to its operations. In Spring 2009, Google hired a herd of 200 goats for a week from California Grazing to mow their lawn. It was apparently more eco-friendly. Google disclosed in September 2011 that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, almost 260 million watts or about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. Google said that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels in 2010. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The corporation exercised this authorization in September 2013 when it announced it would purchase all the electricity produced by the not-yet-built 240-megawatt Happy Hereford wind farm. In July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of power for 20 years. In December 2016, Google announced that, starting in 2017, it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices. The commitment will make Google the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts, 2,600 megawatts, of wind and solar energy. In November 2017, Google bought 536 megawatts of wind power. The purchase made the firm reach 100% renewable energy. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma. In September 2019, Google's chief executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said. In September 2020, Google announced it had retroactively offset all of its carbon emissions since the company's foundation in 1998. It also stated that it is committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. It also said that all its final assembly manufacturing sites will achieve a UL 2799 Zero Waste to Landfill certification by 2022 by ensuring that the vast majority of waste from the manufacturing process is recycled instead of ending up in a landfill. In 2023 Google consumed 24 TWh of electricity, more than countries such as Iceland, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, or Tunisia.
The Culture Of Innovation And Control
Google's corporate philosophy includes principles such as you can make money without doing evil, you can be serious without a suit, and work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. Google's diversity report states that 32 percent of its workforce are women and 68 percent are men, with the ethnicity of its workforce being predominantly white, 51.7%, and Asian, 41.9%. Within tech roles, 23.6 percent were women; and 26.7 percent of leadership roles were held by women. In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, Google's employees are hired based on a hierarchical system. Employees are split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range from entry-level data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level six. As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy known as Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of Search Products and User Experience until July 2012, showed that half of all new product launches in the second half of 2005 had originated from the Innovation Time Off. In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer whose purpose was to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on. Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees. 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. In a lawsuit filed the 8th of January 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against a class defined by their conservative political views, male gender, and/or Caucasian or Asian race. On the 25th of January 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced. The coalition is made up of 13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. The group is affiliated with the UNI Global Union, which represents nearly 20 million international workers from various unions and federations. The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture. Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. In 2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian to convince them employees that unions suck. In February 2025, Google dropped their commitment to make diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, part of everything we do from their annual investor report. This action followed Meta, Amazon, Pepsi, McDonald's, Walmart, and others who all have rolled back their DEI programmes. The original Google logo was designed by Sergey Brin. Google has been designing special, temporary alternate logos to place on their homepage intended to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people. The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed Doodlers. Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on the 1st of April 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet. Google's services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef's Bork bork bork, Pig Latin, Hacker or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine. When searching for the word anagram, meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form other valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays Did you mean: nag a ram? Since 2019, Google runs free online courses to help engineers learn how to plan and author technical documentation better. In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion. The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004 and Megan Smith has replaced him as director. In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, MSRI, Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at Google was the founding of this event for middle school and high school students. In 2011, Google donated €1 million to International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International Mathematical Olympiads, 2011, 2015. In July 2012, Google launched a Legalize Love campaign in support of gay rights. In 2008, Google announced its project 10100, which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites. After two years of no update, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a website that intends to make all legal documents public and online. Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees. Also in February 2022, Google announced a $100 million fund to expand skills training and job placement for low-income Americans, in conjunction with non-profits Year Up, Social Finance, and Merit America. On Fortune magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012, and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index. 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 is Don't be evil. In October 2015, a related motto was adopted in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: Do the right thing. The original motto was retained in the code of conduct of Google, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. In January 2013, then-CEO Larry Page commented, We ended 2012 with a strong quarter ... Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year , not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. Google's consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2013 was reported in mid-October 2013 as $14.89 billion, a 12 percent increase compared to the previous quarter. Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. By January 2014, Google's market capitalization had grown to $397 billion. In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. From the financial year of 2015, figures are published for Alphabet Inc. Until 2014, the key trends of Google were as follows: 1999 revenue 0.22 million USD, net income -6.02 million USD, employees 2000; 2000 revenue 19.1 million USD, net income -14.6 million USD, employees 2000; 2001 revenue 86.4 million USD, net income 6.9 million USD, employees 2842; 2002 revenue 439 million USD, net income 99.6 million USD, employees 682; 2003 revenue 1.4 billion USD, net income 0.10 billion USD, employees 1,628; 2004 revenue 3.1 billion USD, net income 0.39 billion USD, employees 3,021; 2005 revenue 6.1 billion USD, net income 1.4 billion USD, employees 5,680; 2006 revenue 10.6 billion USD, net income 3.0 billion USD, employees 10,674; 2007 revenue 16.5 billion USD, net income 4.2 billion USD, employees 16,805; 2008 revenue 21.8 billion USD, net income 4.2 billion USD, employees 20,222; 2009 revenue 23.6 billion USD, net income 6.5 billion USD, employees 19,835; 2010 revenue 29.3 billion USD, net income 8.5 billion USD, employees 24,400; 2011 revenue 37.9 billion USD, net income 9.7 billion USD, employees 32,467; 2012 revenue 46.0 billion USD, net income 10.7 billion USD, employees 53,861; 2013 revenue 55.5 billion USD, net income 12.7 billion USD, employees 47,756; 2014 revenue 66.0 billion USD, net income 14.1 billion USD, employees 53,600. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go. According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees. 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 for ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries. It would not remove content that is broadly useful, such as news articles, or already part of the public record. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. Raxium is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the development of micro-optics, monolithic integration, and system integration. In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a code red and a directive that all of its most important products, those with more than a billion users, must incorporate generative AI within months. In March 2023, in direct response to the rapid rise of ChatGPT, Google released Bard (now Gemini), a generative artificial intelligence chatbot. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company's tools, including AI technology. The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google's total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search. D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit Mehta held that this monopoly was in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union, EU, based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine. The EU Court of Justice found that Google's treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as discriminatory, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In October 2024, Google was fined by a local Russian court a symbolic 2.5 decillion dollars for allegedly blocking pro-Kremlin propaganda. No payment was made. In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom's economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia's economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region's specific needs and training local talent. The partnership between Google and Saudi Arabia includes collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the Public Investment Fund, PIF, to develop AI applications that will benefit sectors like healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and logistics. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. This cash deal would be Google's biggest ever, as well as it currently being the most expensive deal of 2025. Alphabet reportedly tried to close a deal for only $23 billion in 2024, but this fell apart after concerns about regulatory hurdles, among other issues. Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. The company is backed by a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, as well as notably being partnered with Amazon and Microsoft, as listed in their website. Google reportedly said the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. In September 2025, federal judge Amit Mehta in the United States ruled that Google will not be required to divest Chrome or the Android operating system; however, the ruling barred Google from having exclusive contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and Gemini app products, and ruled Google must share search data with competitors.