Google

History

Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both of whom were PhD students at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. The company was based on the founders’ research in web search and data mining with the goal of making it easier to find high-quality information on the web. The name Google was a play on “googol” (10^100) to reflect the company’s goal to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. On September 4, 1998, Brin and Page incorporated the company in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. In March 1999, Google Inc.’s headquarters were moved to downtown Palo Alto, California, and then settled in a complex of buildings known as the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. In 2020, Google had offices at over 78 locations across North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East.

Google was a privately held company when it was founded in 1998. The company grew rapidly since then. In March 2001, Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO to help them manage the booming business. Three years later, Google went public on August 19, 2004, at its initial public offering price $85 a share. Google sold 22.5 million shares and raised over $1.9 billion in the offering. Shares of Google rose 18.05% [Page 736]to $100.34 at the close on its initial public offering date. In 2015, Google restructured its business with Alphabet as the parent company and Google as its leading subsidiary. After the reorganization, Google had a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, who joined Google in 2004, while Page and Brin became the CEO and president, respectively, of Alphabet. In 2019, Page and Brin announced they were stepping down from the top roles at Alphabet but would remain on the board, while Pichai would become CEO of both Alphabet and Google.

Google profits primarily from online advertising. Google’s advertising programs such as AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange allow Google to play an intermediary role between website owners who produce online content and advertisers who seek online advertising space by matching text and display ads to the content and visitor interest of the given website. Advertisers pay Google based on the clicks of their advertisements, which they can track through Google Analytics. According to the financial results announced by Alphabet on February 3, 2020, Google’s revenue reached $160.743 billion in the 2019 fiscal year, among Alphabet’s $161.857 billion total revenues.

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