Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. Their PageRank algorithm, which ranked web pages based on link analysis, produced dramatically better search results than existing engines. Google quickly became the world’s dominant search engine — a position it hasn’t relinquished in over 25 years.
Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company created in 2015, is one of the most valuable companies on earth with a market cap regularly exceeding $2 trillion. Annual revenue surpassed $300 billion in 2023, with the vast majority coming from advertising (Google Search, YouTube, and Google Network).
Google’s product portfolio is enormous: Search, Chrome (65%+ browser market share), Android (3+ billion active devices), YouTube (2+ billion monthly users), Gmail, Google Maps, Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Drive), and Google Cloud Platform. GCP is the third-largest cloud provider behind AWS and Azure, with annual revenue exceeding $33 billion.
In AI, Google has been both a pioneer and a fast follower. DeepMind (acquired in 2014) created breakthroughs like AlphaFold. Google’s Gemini family of models competes directly with OpenAI’s GPT series. The company also developed the Transformer architecture that underpins virtually all modern large language models.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California (the Googleplex), Alphabet employs over 180,000 people. The company faces ongoing antitrust scrutiny — a 2024 US court ruling found Google had maintained an illegal monopoly in search.
