Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include search, cloud computing, software and online advertising technologies. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Itsmission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",[9] and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".[10][11] In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine. It offers onlineproductivity software including email (Gmail), an office suite (Google Docs), and social networking (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating systemand the browser-only Google Chrome OS[12] for a specialized type of netbook known as a Chromebook. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in production of its high-end Nexus devices and acquired Motorola Mobilityin May 2012.[13] In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.[14]
The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world[15] and to process over one billion search requests[16] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data each day.[17][18][19][20] In December 2012 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 asYouTube and Blogger.[21] Its market dominance has led to criticism over issues including copyright, censorship, and privacy.[22][23]