Google (GOOG) is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information. Google’s innovations in web search and advertising have made its website a top Internet property and its brand one of the most recognized in the world. Google generates revenue primarily by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising. Businesses use Google’s Adwords program to promote their products and services with targeted advertising. In addition, third parties that comprise the Google Network use the AdSense program to deliver relevant ads.
Strong Global Brand
The very first web page was created in 1990 and by late 1992, there were only a mere 26 websites in the world. However, just a few years later, web pages numbered in the tens of millions and searching for information became challenging. To address that challenge, Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, starting from their dorm room built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages. By 1998, they formalized their work and named their search engine Google, a play on the word, googol, which is the mathematical expression for a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists and Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Today, the web has grown by a factor of 10,000 as has Google’s search index. Google serves users in nearly every country and 146 languages. Google’s strong global brand is one of the most recognized in the world as the number of people who use Google’s service every day is in the hundreds of millions with billions of people now having access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones.
Search results are no longer just web pages. They include images, videos, books, maps and more. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube, which lets billions of people watch and share original videos and professional content.
With searches increasingly coming from mobile devices such as smartphones, Google developed Android, a mobile operating system that allows open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers with over 350,000 Android devices activated daily.
To enable faster searches, Google launched a new web browser called Google Chrome with 160 million users. This browser makes it easier for folks to use their favorite Google products like Google Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Translate, which allows users to instantly translate web pages and videos between any of 58 languages.