It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands.
Advertising
Under the terms of the settlement Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately. The judgment claimed Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting data to personalize advertising. On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to "non-public" Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. In September 2024, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices in the online advertising technology market, potentially harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market.
This 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. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. 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. Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport.
In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced. In a lawsuit filed January 8, 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". 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. 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.
Enterprise services
Both firms were initially hesitant about investing jointly in Google, as each wanted to retain a larger percentage of control over the company to themselves. Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. Héctor García-Molina and Jeffrey Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind). After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as "Google"), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services.
In 2020, the FBI used a geofence warrant to request data from Google about Android devices near the Seattle Police Officers Guild building following an arson attempt during Black Lives Matter protests. In January 2025, U.S. federal judge Richard Seeborg rejected Google's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit. In August 2024, Google sent an email to users informing them of its legal obligation to disclose certain confidential information to U.S. government authorities. The lawsuit became known in March 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case, ruling that they must face the group's charges. In early June 2020, a $5 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Google by a group of consumers, alleging that Chrome's Incognito browsing mode still collects their user history. On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon. Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA's massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google. Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings.
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In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. 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. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia.
- 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 doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed.
- 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.
- Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.
- PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.
- In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures.
More ways to search
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 July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions. 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. 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. In 2025, Google announced SynthID Detector, a tool that uses watermarking to identify whether content such as text, images, audio, or video was generated using Google products. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked.
Office locations
Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture. The coalition is made up of "13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland". 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. 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".
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 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. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries.
The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. On the list of largest technology companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues. Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. 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. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.update
- 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 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”.
- 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.
- The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked.
- 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 March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia.
Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In 2017, three women sued Google, accusing the company of violating California's Equal Pay Act by underpaying its female employees.
Google around the globe
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. 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. On March 15, 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. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. 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. 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%.
As of September 30, 2020,update Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. 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. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed uspin casino registration "Doodlers".