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Google The Great - Interesting read

Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.[16] In order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed, advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bidding and click-through rates, with bidding starting at five cents per click.[17][18] This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com (later Overture Services, now part of Yahoo!), one of the most successful companies in the 1990s. Google raised $1.67 million in three rounds of funding in 1998,[19] $25 million in 1999,[20][21] and $100 million in 2000.[22][23][24] An August 2005 secondary public offering raised an additional $4.18 billion,[25] making the total IPO proceeds to date $23.1 billion.[26][notes 1]

In January 1996, Andrei Broder published a paper on the AltaVista search engine providing details of how he had gathered the web crawler data which became the basis for ALIWEB.[27]

In June 1998, Brin and Page presented their paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" to the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia.[28] Since then, Page and Brin have been frequent keynote speakers at conferences and symposia. Over the years they have made several other important contributions to the field of information retrieval, including the establishment of the PageRank algorithm,[29] still used by Google today.

During their research project they had noted that webpages with high citation scores (links from other, well-cited webpages) tended to be ranked higher by conventional search engines. They realized that if they could develop a system that could crawl the web and create an index of all the pages it found, it would be possible to provide much better search results than existing techniques. This became the motivation behind their work.

In March 2001, at Stanford, Brin and Page presented "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", describing Google as "[...] a new kind of search engine".[30] This paper has been cited over 8,800 times.[31][32] Their initial idea was to sell Google as a commercial license to larger companies, but potential customers were not interested. To make Google available to everyone, they set up a charitable corporation, and by the end of 1998 Google was running on 2,000 desktops at Stanford.[33]

The following year, Sergey Brin named Larry Page as the new CEO of Google. Eric Schmidt, who had been hired as Chairman of the Board in 2001, took over as CEO in April 2011. In March 2015, Page once again became the CEO of Google. Marissa Mayer, a former executive at Google, replaced Schmidt as chairman.[34]

Over the years, Google has made several acquisitions to expand its reach into new markets. In February 2003, it acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a web logging service. Google acquired Picasa in July 2004, a web-based photo sharing service.[35]

In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.[36][37] The acquisition brought 400 million new users to Google and helped fuel further growth of the company. In April 2007, Google reached an advertising revenue sharing agreement with MySpace, which was owned by News Corporation at the time.[38]

In May 2010, Google acquired Agnilux, a secretive startup working on chips and hardware systems for servers.[39] That same month, the company also announced the acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising company,[40] for $750 million.

In August 2010, Google announced the acquisition of LabPixies, a Mumbai and Israel-based company that created interactive content such as games, widgets, and greeting cards.[41]

In October 2010, Google acquired Metaweb, a web of data that includes Freebase, a database of more than 12 million entities.[42][43] The acquisition was aimed at improving search results by better understanding the meanings and relationships between entities.

In April 2011, Google announced the acquisition of Admeld,[44] a display advertising platform that helps publishers increase revenue from their ad inventory. That same month, the company also acquired PushLife,[45] a mobile content management system.

In July 2011, Google announced the acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion,[46] its largest acquisition to date. The purchase was made in order to gain access to Motorola's portfolio of patents and mobile devices. In August 2011, Google announced the acquisition of Frommer's,[47] a travel guidebook series.

In January 2012, Google acquired Wildfire Interactive,[48] a social media marketing company. That same month, the company also announced the acquisition of SketchUp,[49] a 3D modeling program used by architects, engineers, and graphic designers.

In May 2012, Google announced the acquisition of Quickoffice,[50] a mobile productivity suite that allows users to create and edit Microsoft Office documents on their smartphones and tablet computers. In June 2012, Google announced the acquisition of Waze,[51] a social GPS navigation app.

In September 2013, Google announced the acquisition of Bump Technologies,[52] a company that develops mobile apps that allow users to share contact information and files by bumping their phones together. In November 2013, Google announced the acquisition of Makani Power,[53] a company that is developing energy kites, which are tethered wings that generate power from wind.

In January 2014, Google acquired Nest Labs,[54] a manufacturer of smart thermostats and smoke detectors. In May 2014, Google announced the acquisition of SlickLogin,[55] a company that is developing technology that allows users to log into websites and apps using their smartphones or other devices.

In January 2015, Google announced the acquisition of DeepMind,[56] a company that is developing artificial intelligence technology. In February 2015, Google announced the acquisition of Jaiku,[57] a social networking service.

In September 2015, Google announced the acquisition of Makani Power, a company that is developing energy kites, which are tethered wings that generate power from wind.[58]

In January 2016, Google announced the formation of Alphabet Inc., a holding company that would house Google and its other businesses.[59] Under the new structure, Page became the CEO of Alphabet and Sundar Pichai became the CEO of Google.[60]

In October 2016, Google completed the sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion.[61][62]

In December 2016, Google acquired Owlchemy Labs,[63] a virtual reality company that is best known for its Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality games.

In January 2017, Google announced the acquisition of AIMatter,[64] a startup that is developing artificial intelligence technology. In February 2017, Google completed the sale of its satellite imaging business to Planet Labs.[65]

In September 2017, Google announced the acquisition of HTC's Pixel smartphone division for $1.1 billion.[66] The deal will see Google acquiring HTC's engineering team that worked on the Pixel smartphones.

As of October 2017, Google has made over 200 acquisitions,[67] with the most notable ones being the acquisitions of YouTube, Android, Motorola Mobility, and DeepMind.

In January 2018, Google announced the acquisition of Viewpoint Robotics,[68] a company that is developing technology for robots to navigate autonomously in unstructured environments. In February 2018, Google completed the acquisition of Xively,[69] a cloud-based Internet of Things platform from LogMeIn.

In May 2018, Google announced the acquisition of ITA Software,[70] a flight search and planning company, from American Airlines and other investors for $700 million. In June 2018, Google announced the acquisition of Velostrata,[71] a cloud migration startup.

In September 2018, Google announced the acquisition of Disqus,[72] a blog comment hosting service. In October 2018, Google completed the acquisition of Sigmoid Labs,[73] the company behind the AppSheet mobile app development platform.

In January 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Looker,[74] a data analytics startup, for $2.6 billion. In February 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Fitbit,[75] a fitness tracker company, for $2.1 billion.

In June 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Alooma,[76] a cloud data migration startup. In August 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Toontastic,[77] an educational cartoon creation startup.

In November 2019, Google completed the acquisition of Fitbit,[78] a fitness tracker company, for $2.1 billion. The deal was first announced in October 2018.[79]

In January 2020, Google announced the acquisition of Elastifile,[80] a cloud file storage startup. In February 2020, Google completed the acquisition of Looker,[81] a data analytics startup, for $2.6 billion. The deal was first announced in June 2019.[82]

In March 2020, Google completed the acquisition of Stackdriver,[83] a cloud monitoring and logging service provider, from Amazon Web Services for an undisclosed sum. In May 2020, Google announced the acquisition of North,[84] a smart glasses company.

As of June 2020, Google has made over 240 acquisitions,[85] with the most notable ones being the acquisitions of YouTube, Android, Motorola Mobility, DeepMind, Looker, and Fitbit.

Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai is an Indian American business executive. He is the CEO of both Google and its holding company Alphabet Inc.[3]

Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1972.[4][5] His mother Lakshmi was a stenographer and his father Regunatha Pichai was an electrical engineer at General Electric.[6][7][8] He grew up in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.[9][10] He earned his degree from IIT Kharagpur in metallurgical engineering.[11]

Pichai worked as a materials scientist at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company before joining Google in 2004.[12] He led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive.[13] He was then appointed the vice president of product development in 2013, overseeing the design and development of all consumer products, such as Search, Maps, YouTube, and Apps.[14][15]

In October 2015, Pichai gave a keynote about Google's plans for the future at the Internet Association's policy conference in Washington D.C.. In this presentation he stated that "Mobile as a computing platform is where personal computing was in 1980."[16][17]

Pichai was named the CEO of Google on 10 August 2015 after former CEO and co-founder Larry Page announced that he would be creating Alphabet Inc., a new holding company for Google with Pichai as its CEO.[18][19] As the CEO of Google, Pichai oversees all of its Internet products and services, such as Search, Maps, YouTube, Apps, and Android. He also oversees the technical infrastructure of the company.[20]

In December 2019, it was announced that Pichai had been awarded a $240 million stock grant which will vest over four years. The grant is performance-based, meaning that if Google meets certain financial targets during that time, Pichai will receive the full value of the grant. If not, he will only receive a portion of it. This grant is in addition to the $1.9 million salary and $380,769 bonus that he received in 2019.[21]

Pichai has been described as a "thought leader" on technology issues.[22][23] He is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry and has spoken about the need to increase the number of women and minorities in tech.[24][25]

In 2017, Pichai was ranked #9 on Forbes' list of the World's Most Powerful People.[26] In 2018, he was ranked #4 on Fortune's list of the World's Greatest Leaders.[27] And in 2019, he was once again ranked #9 on Forbes' list of the World's Most Powerful People.[28]

Pichai has been married to Anjali Pichai since 2004. They have two children together.[29][30]

The tech giant plans on adding more content to the site in order to make it a one-stop shop for all things Google. This includes everything from how-to videos and product demonstrations, to user generated reviews and even a Q&A section where users can ask questions and get answers from experts.

In addition to adding new content, Google also plans on redesigning the existing website to make it more user friendly and easier to navigate. The goal is to make it simpler for users to find the information they need, without having to search through multiple pages or clicks.

This brings the question of where is Bing, Ask.com, or maybe even DuckDuckGo? Google has the majority of the search engine market share. Experts state that "Google's dominance in search is unquestioned, but the company has been under pressure from antitrust regulators in Europe."[31] This could be due to the fact that "In March 2015, Google was hit with a record $57 million fine by the European Union for violating antitrust laws."[32]

The new content and redesign of their website is a way for Google to show that they are still the top dog when it comes to search engines. They want to keep users coming back to their site, and this is one way to do it.

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