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Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is an American multinational Internet and software corporation specialized in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. It hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates.
Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Amit Patel and supported by Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as the Gmail email service, the Google Docs office suite, and the Google+ social networking service. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the Google Chrome web browser, the Picasa photo organizing and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system, found on specialized laptops called Chromebooks.
The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge. However, it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations, and lack of editing to correct the thousands of errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.
Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973) is a Soviet-born American computer scientist who, along with Larry Page, is best known as a co-founder of Google. Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage. The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an "Enlightenment Man", and someone who believes that "knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance", a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful" and "Don't be evil".
- ...that in addition to Google Earth, there is Google Mars, Moon, and Sky?
- ...that Google's latest design language, material design, was codenamed quantum paper?
- ...that the Google Summer of Code draws its name from the 1967 Summer of Love?
- ...that Google's 2005 April Fools' prank was announcing Google Gulp, a fictional drink?
- ...Google plans to provide internet access to rural and remote areas through balloons?
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'Map' by Aram Bartholl at Kasseler Kunstverein, Fridericianum Kassel, in 2013.
| “ | Our philosophy that the user comes first is the only philosophy we should have, because if they want social aspects to search, we’ll find a way to make it happen. Same with real-time. We’ll find the technology. We’ll find the interface. We’ll get it to our users. | ” |
| — Amit Singhal, Google engineer (2009) Google Search Guru Singhal: We Will Try Outlandish Ideas from Bloomberg Businessweek |
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