Sundar Pichai

Google

Google is an American search engine company founded in 1998 by Stanford doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and since 2015 the flagship subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. Its rise began with a research project called BackRub that ranked web pages by their links: PageRank, the algorithm described in Brin and Page's 1998 Stanford paper, which treated a link as a citation and let the web itself vote on what mattered. A prototype indexing at least 24 million pages grew into a company that earned money by pairing its search engine with keyword advertising — AdWords opened to self-service advertisers in 2000 and AdSense put ads on third-party sites in 2003 — a model that by 2025 still produced more than 70% of its revenues. Google expanded by acquisition and invention: Blogger, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube (2006, $1.65 billion), Android (unveiled in 2007 with the Open Handset Alliance) and the AI lab DeepMind (2014). In 2015 Google Inc. was restructured under Alphabet, with Sundar Pichai as Google's CEO. Scale brought scrutiny: the FTC closed a search-bias probe with voluntary commitments in 2013; the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion (2017, comparison shopping), €4.34 billion (2018, Android) and €1.49 billion (2019, AdSense); the US Department of Justice sued in 2020, won a landmark ruling in August 2024 that 'Google is a monopolist', and secured behavioural remedies in September 2025; a second DOJ case over the advertising-technology stack succeeded in April 2025. In FY2025 Alphabet reported $402.8 billion in revenues and 190,820 employees.