Google is a multinational corporation from the United States of
America. It is known for creating and running one of the
largest search engines on the World Wide Web (WWW). Every
day more than a billion people use it.
Google's headquarters (known as the "Googleplex") is
in Mountain View, California, part of the Silicon Valley. The
current motto of Google is "Do the right thing".
Ever since the 2 September 2015, Google is owned by a
new holding company called Alphabet Inc, which has taken over
some of Google's other projects, such as its driverless cars. It is
a public company that trades on the NASDAQ under the
tickers GOOG and GOOGL.
Google's search engine can
find pictures, videos, news, Usenet newsgroups, and things
to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web
pages on its database, 880 million pictures and 845 million
Usenet messages — six billion things.[source?] Google's
American website has an Alexa rank of 1, meaning it is the most
widely visited website in the world. It is so widely known that
people sometimes use the word "google" as a verb that means "to
search for something on Google"; but because more than half of
people on the web use it, "google" has been used to mean "to
search the web".
History[change | change source]
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University,
USA, started BackRub in early 1996. They made it into a
company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage
in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved
to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California, and then moved to
another place called the Googleplex.[7][8]
In September 2001, Google's rating system (PageRank, for
saying which information is more helpful) got a U.S. Patent. The
patent was to Stanford University, with Lawrence (Larry) Page as
the inventor (the person who first had the idea).
Google makes a percentage of its money through America
Online and InterActiveCorp. It has a special group known as the
Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps
make contracts, helps making accounts better, and gives
engineering help.
How Google makes money[change | change source]
Google makes money by advertising. People or companies who
want people to buy their product, service, or ideas give Google
money, and Google shows an advertisement to people Google
thinks will click on the advertisement. Google only gets money
when people click on the link, so it tries to know as much about
people as possible to only show the advertisement to the "right
people". It does this with Google Analytics, which sends data
back to Google whenever someone visits a web site. From this
and other data, Google makes a profile about the person, and
then uses this profile to figure out which advertisements to show.
The name "Google"[change | change source]
The name "Google" is a misspelling of the word googol.[9][10] Milton
Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this
word in 1938, for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes
(10100). It is said that the word "googol" was chosen as a name for
this number because it sounded like baby talk.[source?] Google uses
this word because the company wants to make lots of stuff on the
Web easy to find and use. Andy Bechtolsheim thought of the
name.
The name for Google's main office, the "Googleplex," is a play on
a different, even bigger number, the "googolplex", which is 1
followed by one googol of zeroes 1010
