Google

Google is an American search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.¹. More than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing the company at the heart of most internet users' experience¹. Its principal executive offices are at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California².

The place inside Alphabet dates from 2015, when Alphabet Inc. replaced Google Inc. as the publicly traded entity and Google became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the new holding company³. By its own account, Google makes hundreds of products — YouTube and Android, Gmail and, of course, Google Search among them — used by billions of people across the globe⁴.

The scale is recorded in Alphabet's most recent annual report: consolidated revenues of $402,836 million for fiscal year 2025, up $52,818 million, or 15%, from $350,018 million in 2024, with operating income of $129,039 million². More than 70% of those revenues came from online advertising². Alphabet had 190,820 employees as of December 31, 2025².

The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University, where Larry Page was considering Stanford for graduate school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around⁴. By the following year they had struck a partnership and, working from their dorm rooms, built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web — they called it Backrub⁴. Britannica records the same founding insight in plainer terms: the pair tracked each site's incoming links, the number of other pages pointing to it, so that web users' own linking choices would rank the web¹. The project was soon renamed Google, a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders' mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful⁴.

The system was presented to the research world in the 1998 Stanford paper by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, which described Google as a prototype of a large-scale search engine making heavy use of the structure present in hypertext⁵. The prototype, served at google.stanford.edu, carried a full-text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages⁵. The paper credited two features with the engine's precision: a quality ranking calculated from the web's link structure, called PageRank, and the way the engine used link information⁵. That ranking was defined as an objective measure of a page's citation importance, one that corresponded well with people's subjective idea of importance⁵.

Formally, the PageRank of a page A is given as PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)), where T1 through Tn are the pages citing A and C(A) is the number of links going out of page A⁵. The parameter d is a damping factor that can be set between 0 and 1 and was usually set to 0.85; the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all pages' PageRanks is one⁵. The model reads as a description of user behaviour: a hypothetical random surfer who is handed a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting back, until boredom sends the surfer to another random page⁵.

By early 1998 the team had created maps containing as many as 518 million of the web's hyperlinks — a citation graph that existing search engines had largely left unused⁵. The work was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306⁵. The PageRank method itself was left to a companion manuscript, “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web”, credited to Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd⁵; that manuscript carries the date January 29, 1998⁶.

Most of the system was written in C or C++ for efficiency, and it could run on either Solaris or Linux⁵. Crawling was done by several distributed crawlers fed lists of URLs by a URLserver; a storeserver compressed the fetched pages into a repository, while an indexer and a sorter built the barrels of the index, whose entries were keyed by anonymous document identifiers⁵.

Every hit carried position information, so the engine made extensive use of the proximity of query words; it also tracked visual presentation details such as font size, weighting words set in a larger or bolder font more heavily than others⁵. Link text was treated as data about the destination page, since anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of a page than the page itself, and in the 24-million-page crawl the team indexed over 259 million anchors⁵. The final ordering combined a classical information-retrieval score with PageRank⁵.

In total it took roughly nine days to download the 26-million-page crawl, including errors⁵. Once the system was running smoothly it moved much faster, downloading the last 11 million pages in just 63 hours — averaging just over 4 million pages per day⁵. The compressed repository was about 53 GB, just over one third of the total data it stored⁵. The 1998 engine answered most queries in between 1 and 10 seconds, against a target of several hundred queries per second⁵.

On October 23, 2000, Google announced the immediate availability of AdWords, a program that enabled any advertiser to purchase individualized and affordable keyword advertising appearing instantly on the google.com search results page⁷. An ad appeared only if a user entered the same keywords or phrase the advertiser had purchased, ensuring a prequalified visitor and sparing advertisers the cost of off-target impressions⁷. The launch price list was quoted in impressions: CPMs of $15, $12 and $10 — 1.5, 1.2 and 1 cent per impression — for the top, middle and bottom ad unit positions⁷.

On June 18, 2003, Google announced a new self-service option for AdSense, a program enabling website publishers to serve ads precisely targeted to the specific content of their individual web pages⁸. Publishers served text-based AdWords ads on their own sites and were paid for clicks on them, gaining instant access to Google's network of more than 100,000 advertisers, from large global brands to small and local businesses⁸.

On October 9, 2006, Google announced it had agreed to acquire YouTube — the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos — for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction⁹. Following the acquisition YouTube would operate independently to preserve its brand and community, remain based in San Bruno, California, and keep all of its employees⁹. At the time YouTube delivered more than 100 million video views every day, with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily⁹.

On November 5, 2007, a broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies announced the development of Android, describing it as the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices¹⁰. Thirty-four companies formed the Open Handset Alliance, which aimed to develop technologies that would significantly lower the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services¹⁰. Consumers were told to expect the first phones based on Android in the second half of 2008¹⁰. Google chairman Eric Schmidt called the announcement more ambitious than any single “Google Phone” the press had been speculating about, with a vision that the platform would power thousands of different phone models¹⁰.

DeepMind was founded in London in 2010 and, having been acquired by Google in 2014, became part of the Alphabet group¹¹. Google's AI efforts now sit in Google DeepMind, which brings together Google Brain and DeepMind into a single team led by CEO Demis Hassabis¹¹. The lab's record includes AlphaGo, unveiled in 2015 as the first computer program to defeat a Go world champion, and AlphaFold, launched in 2020 to predict 3D models of protein structures accurately¹¹.

The same period brought other landmark deals: the online advertising firm DoubleClick, bought in 2007 for $3.1 billion as Google's largest acquisition to that point¹. Two years later the company acquired the mobile advertising network AdMob for $750 million¹. In 2012 Google paid about $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, including a patent portfolio of over 24,000 patents and patent applications¹².

On August 10, 2015, Larry Page announced the creation of a new company, called Alphabet, which he would run as CEO with Sergey Brin as President³. Alphabet Inc. would replace Google Inc. as the publicly traded entity, with all shares of Google automatically converting into the same number of shares of Alphabet, and Google becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary³. Sundar Pichai became CEO of the company Page described as the slightly slimmed down Google³. Alphabet was mostly a collection of companies, the largest of which was Google, and segment reporting was set to begin with the Q4 results³.

Page opened by quoting the founders' original letter from 11 years earlier: Google is not a conventional company, and the founders did not intend to become one³. He noted that many of those crazy things now had over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome and Android³.

Under the new structure Google is reported in two segments — Google Services and Google Cloud — with all non-Google businesses grouped collectively as Other Bets². The company's AI and productivity story runs through the same reporting line: Gemini for Google Workspace brings Google's AI-powered agents into Gmail, Docs, Sheets and more to help users write, organize, visualize, accelerate workflows and have more productive meetings².

Breadth is the point: by its own count, Google's hundreds of products — from YouTube and Android to Gmail and, of course, Google Search — are used by billions of people across the globe⁴.

On January 3, 2013, Google agreed to change some of its business practices to resolve Federal Trade Commission concerns that those practices could stifle competition in the markets for popular devices such as smart phones, tablets and gaming consoles, as well as the market for online search advertising¹². Under the commitments, Google removed restrictions on the use of its AdWords platform that made it more difficult for advertisers to coordinate campaigns across multiple platforms, and promised all websites the option to keep their content out of Google's vertical search offerings while still having it appear in general, or organic, search results¹². The FTC also closed its search-bias investigation: it concluded that the introduction of Universal Search, and later algorithm changes even where they may have harmed individual competitors, could be plausibly justified as innovations that improved Google's product and the experience of its users¹².

The European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion on June 27, 2017, for abusing its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to its own comparison shopping service, ordering the conduct ended within 90 days or facing penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company¹³. The decision dated the strategy change to 2008, when Google began to implement in European markets a fundamental change of approach to push its comparison shopping service¹³. A second decision, on July 18, 2018, fined Google €4.34 billion over restrictions imposed since 2011 on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators: requiring pre-installation of Search and Chrome as a condition for licensing the Play Store, paying large manufacturers and operators for exclusive pre-installation of the Search app, and preventing manufacturers of unapproved Android forks from selling devices running them¹⁴. A third fine, €1.49 billion on March 20, 2019, concerned restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites which prevented Google's rivals from placing their search adverts on those sites¹⁵. On September 10, 2024, the Court of Justice, sitting as Grand Chamber, dismissed Google's appeal and ordered Google and Alphabet to bear their own costs and to pay the costs incurred by the European Commission¹⁶.

The US case began on October 20, 2020, when the Department of Justice, along with eleven state Attorneys General, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to stop Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets¹⁷. At filing the government described Google as the monopoly gatekeeper to the internet, worth $1 trillion and accounting for almost 90 percent of all search queries in the United States; among the exclusionary agreements alleged was a long-term Apple deal requiring Google to be the default — and de facto exclusive — general search engine on Apple's Safari browser¹⁷.

In August 2024 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia released a 277-page opinion concluding that Google is a monopolist, and that it acted as one to maintain its monopoly, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act¹⁸. On September 2, 2025, the court ordered remedies: Google was prohibited from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app, ordered to make certain search index and user-interaction data available to rivals and potential rivals, and ordered to offer search and search text ads syndication services¹⁸. The court framed the remedies as a way to pry open the market for general search services, which it described as frozen in place for over a decade, and they were written to reach generative-AI technologies and companies¹⁸. A parallel case over the ad tech stack, filed in January 2023, was decided against Google on April 17, 2025, when the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia held that Google violated antitrust law by monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets; the court found that Google had harmed its publishing customers, the competitive process and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web¹⁹. By the remedy stage, the United States was joined in pursuing the remedies ordered by 49 states, two territories and the District of Columbia¹⁸.

The record below runs from the FTC's commitments of January 3, 2013, through the European Commission fines, to the remedies ordered in Washington on September 2, 2025¹⁸.

The fiscal 2025 scoreboard: advertising revenue of $294,691 million — more than 70% of total revenues — within consolidated revenues of $402,836 million and operating income of $129,039 million². Google Cloud produced $58,705 million, while capital expenditures, primarily investments in technical infrastructure, were $91.4 billion for the year ended December 31, 2025². Alphabet counted 190,820 employees as of December 31, 2025².

Within advertising, Google Search & other contributed $224,532 million, YouTube ads $40,367 million and the Google Network $29,792 million². Beyond ads, subscriptions, platforms and devices brought in $48,030 million². By segment, Google Services totalled $342,721 million, Google Cloud $58,705 million and Other Bets $1,537 million².

The mix still leans on the engine that started it all: more than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most internet users' experience¹. Alphabet describes Gemini for Google Workspace as bringing its AI-powered agents into Gmail, Docs, Sheets and more to help users write, organize, visualize, accelerate workflows and have more productive meetings².