Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software.[7] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.[8][9]

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex.[10]

In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. When this restructuring took place on October 2, 2015, Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.[11][12][13][14][15]

Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers online productivity software (Google Docs) including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing (Google Chrome), organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and instant messaging and video chat (Hangouts). The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS[16] for a class of netbooks known as Chromebooks and desktop PCs known as Chromeboxes. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware, partnering with major electronics manufacturers[17] in the production of its "high-quality low-cost"[18] Nexus devices.[19] In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.[20]

Google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007).[21] It processes over one billion search requests[22] and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009).[23][24][25][26] In December 2013, Alexa listed Google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger.[27]

Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".[28][29][30] In October 2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right thing".[31]