Google, in full Google LLC formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017), American search engine company, founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, that is a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. More than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.

Google began as an online search firm, but it now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from e-mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers. In addition, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put it in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high-tech marketplace, along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Despite this myriad of products, its original search tool remains the core of its success. In 2016 Alphabet earned nearly all of its revenue from Google advertising based on users’ search requests.

Searching for business

Bin and Page, who met as graduate students at Stanford University, were intrigued with the idea of extracting meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room at Stanford to devise a new type of search technology, which they dubbed Back Rub. The key was to leverage Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each Web site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Most search engines simply returned a list of Web sites ranked by how often a search phrase appeared on them. Bin and Page incorporated into the search function the number of links each Web site had; i.e., a Web site with thousands of links would logically be more valuable than one with just a few links, and the search engine thus would place the heavily linked site higher on a list of possibilities. Further, a link from a heavily linked Web site would be a more valuable “vote” than one from a more obscure Web site.

In mid-1998, Bin and Page began receiving outside financing (one of their first investors was Andy Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc.). They ultimately raised about $1 million from investors, family, and friends and set up shop in Menlo Park, California, under the name Google, which was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeroes). By mid-1999, when Google received a $25 million round of venture capital funding, it was processing 500,000 queries per day. Activity began to explode in 2000, when Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo!. By 2004, when Yahoo! dispensed with Google’s services, users were searching on Google 200 million times a day. That growth only continued: by the end of 2011 Google was handling some three billion searches per day. The company’s name became so ubiquitous that it entered the lexicon as a verb: to google became a common expression for searching the Internet.