When you sign in to your Google Account, all the Google services you use work together to help you get more done. Your account helps you do more by personalizing your Google experience and offering easy access to your most important information from anywhere. Sign in to your Google Account, and get the most out of all the Google services you use. Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters.
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In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media. In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets the user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality (VR) media. In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions. Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers. A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites. In 2025, Google announced SynthID Detector, a tool that uses watermarking to identify whether content such as text, images, audio, or video was generated using Google products.
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In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus’ energy needs. There is no official data on the number of servers in Google data centers; however, research and advisory firm Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. In September 2025 Google opened their £735m AI Centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and announced their plans for £5 bn investment in AI research, in the same month that Alphabet reached market capitalisation of $3 trillion. Google’s services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef’s “Bork bork bork”, Pig Latin, “Hacker” or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM.
Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings. The lawsuit claims Google collected data from users who had specifically opted out of tracking. Under the terms of the settlement Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway.
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In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed “Doodlers”. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. On the list of largest technology companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues.
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In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called “Project Bernanke” that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services. On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia. The company subsequently announced that “48 employees have been fired over the last two years” for sexual misconduct. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo! PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Corporate identity
Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. You can also control what data is saved in your account with easy on/off controls, and even delete your data by date, product, and topic.
- In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations.
- In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees.
- In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees.
- Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019.
- Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies.
- In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called “Project Bernanke” that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services.
In September 2024, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices in the online advertising technology market, potentially harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. In 2008, Google announced its “project 10100”, which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites. In December 2016, Google announced that—starting in 2017—it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices.
- The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market.
- The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma.
- While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites.
- In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal.
After some additional small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States.
Google became Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each.
Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019. In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. On September 14, 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion (£3.5 billion) fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google’s search and web browser apps. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by “imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites” that required them to exclude search results from Google’s rivals.
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In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The new campus, reported to be the company’s largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees.
In 2020, the FBI used a geofence warrant to request data from Google about Android devices near the Seattle Police Officers Guild building following an arson attempt during Black Lives Matter protests. In August 2024, Google sent an email to users informing them of its legal obligation to disclose certain confidential information to U.S. government authorities. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. In May 2024, a misconfiguration in Google Cloud led to the accidental deletion of UniSuper’s $135 billion Australian pension fund account, affecting over half a million members who were unable to access their accounts for a week. Google was grilled at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later.
In June 2022, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. The investigation claimed Google used its market power to prevent rivals from competing fairly, affecting billions spent on digital ads. Google, which intended to appeal, argued that the proposals were too extreme, while also dealing with other antitrust cases involving its app store and advertising operations.
For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. In 2007, Google launched “AdSense for Mobile”, taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators. In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
On March 15, 2016, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 360 Suite, “a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers” which can be integrated with BigQuery on the Google Cloud Platform. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. According to comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the vegas casino apk company’s tools, including AI technology. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google’s capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.
In a lawsuit filed January 8, 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against a class defined by their “conservative political views, male gender, and/or … Caucasian or Asian race”. In an effort to maintain the company’s unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer whose purpose was to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on. Some of Google’s services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent endeavors. Employees are split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range “from entry-level data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level six”. As of September 30, 2020,update Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google.
