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. Its 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". In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex.
Google on ad-tech London, 2010
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), an office suite (Google Drive), 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 system and the browser-only Chrome OS for a 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 Mobility in May 2012. In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.
The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world and to process over one billion search requestsabout 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day. 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. Its market dominance has led to criticism of the company over issues such as copyright, censorship, and privacy.
Search engine
According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. Google indexes billions of web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators.
In 2003, The New York Times complained about Google's indexing, claiming that Google's caching of content on its site infringed its copyright for the content. In this case, the United States District Court of Nevada ruled in favor of Google in Field v. Google and Parker v. Google. The publication 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has compiled a list of words that the web giant's new instant search feature will not search.
Google Watch has criticized Google's PageRank algorithms, saying that they discriminate against new websites and favor established sites.The site has also alleged that there are connections between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Google also hosts Google Books. The company began scanning books and uploading limited previews, and full books where allowed, into its new book search engine. The Authors Guild, a group that represents 8,000 U.S. authors, filed a class action suit in a New York City federal court against Google in 2005 over this service. Google replied that it is in compliance with all existing and historical applications of copyright laws regarding books. Google eventually reached a revised settlement in 2009 to limit its scans to books from the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Canada. Furthermore, the Paris Civil Court ruled against Google in late 2009, asking it to remove the works of La Martinière (Éditions du Seuil) from its database. In competition with Amazon.com, Google sells digital versions of new books.
On July 21, 2010, in response to Bing, Google updated its image search to display a streaming sequence of thumbnails that enlarge when pointed at. Though web searches still appear in a batch per page format, on July 23, 2010, dictionary definitions for certain English words began appearing above the linked results for web searches.
The "Hummingbird" update to the Google search engine was announced in September 2013. The update was introduced over the month prior to the announcement and allows users ask the search engine a question in natural language rather than entering keywords into the search box.
Productivity tools
Gmail, a free webmail service provided by Google, was launched as an invitation-only beta program on April 1, 2004,and became available to the general public on February 7, 2007.The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, at which time it had 146 million users monthly. The service was the first online email service with onegigabyte of storage. It was also the first to keep emails from the same conversation together in one thread, similar to an Internet forum.[164] The service offers over 15 GB of free storage, shared with other Google Apps, with additional storage ranging from 20 GB to 16 TB available for US$0.25 per 1 GB per year.
Gmail uses AJAX, a programming technique that allows web pages to be interactive without refreshing the browser.[169] Steve Ballmer (Microsoft's CEO),Liz Figueroa,]Mark Rasch, and the editors of Google Watch have criticised the privacy of Gmail, but Google claims that mail sent to or from Gmail is never read by a human being beyond the account holder and is only used to improve relevance of advertisements.
In 2004, Google started opensource software project hosting, called Google Code, which allows developers to download incomplete programs at no charge. Google Docs, another part of Google's productivity suite, allows users to create, edit, and collaborate on documents in an online environment, similar to Microsoft Word. The service was originally called Writely, but was obtained by Google on March 9, 2006, and was released as an invitation-only preview.On June 6 after the acquisition, Google created an experimental spreadsheet editing program,which was combined with Google Docs on October 10.
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