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Google is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software.[6] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords.
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",[9] and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".[10][11] In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed theGoogleplex.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyondGoogle's core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), an office suite (Google Drive), and social networking (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing andediting photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS[12] for a netbook known as a Chromebook. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in production of its high-end Nexus devices and acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012.[13] In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.[14]
The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007)[15] and to process over one billion search requests[16] and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009).[17][18][19][20] In December 2013 Alexa listed google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger.[21] Its market dominance has led to prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues such as copyright, censorship, and privacy.
History
Main article: History of Google
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.[25]
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[26] They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[27][28]
