Google is an American company that is a subsidiary of Alphabet, a parent company which was created in 2015. Google itself was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, both students at Standford University at the time. They control 56% of the company, although they only own a combined 14% of its stock. Google is mainly known as a search engine but has forayed into some other businesses.
In 2015, Alphabet employed 61814 employees worldwide and generated about $75 Billion in revenues, and $21.3B for the fourth quarter of 2015 alone.
The name Google comes from the term “googol” which means 10 followed by 100 zeros.
In short, this is a very large number, which refers to the vastness of the Internet and digital information world, which Google’s mission is to “organize”.
Google’s search engine was initially called “BackRub” and based on the now-famous PageRank algorithm. Although PageRank still exists, it is now one of the hundreds of ranking “signals” or factors that Google employs to sort relevant pages in relation to searches.
Ironically, when Google launched, the search market was “saturated” with successful competitors such as Excite, Yahoo, Lycos or Altavista. However, Google’s superior search results and advertising prowess allowed it to quickly grab the top spot
You can keep track of Google by following their official Google blog or via Google’s Twitter account if you prefer very small bites of information. Obviously, you can also keep track of what’s new with Google by checking our Google articles.