Google

Google LLC was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students at Stanford University, as a search engine company. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, at the Googleplex, the company became a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. following a corporate restructuring completed in October 2015.

Google's core products include Google Search, the advertising platforms Google Ads and AdSense, the Android mobile operating system, the Chrome browser, YouTube, Gmail, and the Google Workspace productivity suite. The company also operates Google Cloud, a provider of infrastructure and platform services competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and develops the Gemini family of AI models used across its consumer and enterprise products. Google's advertising business, spanning Search and YouTube, remains the largest source of revenue for parent company Alphabet.

Google went public in August 2004 through an IPO on the Nasdaq under the ticker GOOG (later joined by GOOGL for Class A shares), raising approximately $1.67 billion. Since then it has made numerous acquisitions, including YouTube (2006, $1.65B), DoubleClick (2007, $3.1B), Motorola Mobility (2012, $12.5B, later sold), Nest Labs (2014, $3.2B), and Fitbit (2021, $2.1B). Alphabet employs more than 180,000 people worldwide as of recent filings.