In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. Google spent “tens of millions of dollars” on getting major publishers such as Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees. Most employees were also working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures.
Enterprise services
In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025.
- Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year.
- At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024.
- This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region’s specific needs and training local talent.
- In 2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian to “convince them (employees) that unions suck”.
Products and services
The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture. The coalition is made up of “13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland”. 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”.
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. Google was grilled at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later.
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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. On September 10, 2024, Europe’s top court imposed a €2.4 billion fine on Google for abusing its dominance in the shopping comparison market, marking the conclusion of a case that began in 2009 with a complaint from British firm Foundem. Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019.
Research and technology
- 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.
- In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures.
- In 2007, Google launched “AdSense for Mobile”, taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.
- It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records.
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. 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. 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%.
Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. The company’s fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York (US), Bude (UK) and Bilbao (Spain), and is expected to become operational in 2022. Google’s Global Offices sum a total of 86 locations worldwide, with 32 offices in North America, three of them in Canada and 29 in the United States, California being the state with the most Google’s offices with 9 in total including the Googleplex. In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions at the time of the deal’s announcement in January, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017. It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney (birthplace location of Google Maps) and London (part of Android development).
Google’s Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users’ clicks on advertisements. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the pin up casino india first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google’s holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.update The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.
Get the details on how Search works — from the approach we take, to the technology behind it.
Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. Héctor García-Molina and Jeffrey Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project.
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. Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy.
Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. It has been referred to as “the most powerful company in the world” by BBC, and is one of the world’s most valuable brands. We show different kinds of content to help you find what you’re looking for – from maps to movie times. Discover the details of how Search works – from the technology we make to the approach we take. Explore AI experiments from across the company. Your personalized AI research assistant, right at your fingertips.
Also in February 2022, Google announced a $100 million fund to expand skills training and job placement for low-income Americans, in conjunction with non-profits Year Up, Social Finance, and Merit America. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees. Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens.
Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA’s massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google. 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.
The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In 2017, three women sued Google, accusing the company of violating California’s Equal Pay Act by underpaying its female employees. The DoJ also sought a ban on Google re-entering the browser market for five years and restrictions on its investments in rival search or AI technologies. On October 8, 2024, The U.S. government suggested it could request Google to divest parts of its business, such as the Chrome browser and Android, due to its alleged monopoly in online search.
In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region’s specific needs and training local talent.
The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company. Terry Semel, Yahoo’s then-CEO, offered $3 billion to purchase the company, but Page and Brin reportedly held firm on a $5 billion valuation. Both firms were initially hesitant about investing jointly in Google, as each wanted to retain a larger percentage of control over the company to themselves.
Among other things, the suite is designed to help “enterprise class marketers” “see the complete customer journey”, generate “useful insights”, and “deliver engaging experiences to the right people”. 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.
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. On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.
Data loss
Google’s other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind). After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as “Google”), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s internet properties and interests.