What You Need to Know About Google

The name Google is synonymous with the internet and, for most people, with search. However, the company’s reach extends far beyond its web search engine. The internet-based company is a multibillion-dollar conglomerate that includes numerous products, services and apps.

What began as a research project helmed by two Stanford University graduate students has transformed into one of the world’s most influential technology companies. The company’s success has been due to a number of factors, but the most important is the company’s commitment to continuous innovation. It is this spirit of innovation that has led the company to branch out into areas such as wearable tech, mobile operating systems and driverless cars.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company to develop an efficient, user-friendly search engine that would provide relevant results for their searches. They named the company Google after the mathematical expression “googol,” a 1 followed by 100 zeros, because they felt it accurately reflected their desire to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Unlike so many of the other companies that sprung up during the dotcom boom, Page and Brin avoided the typical Silicon Valley playbook. Glitz, hype and excess were out; frugality, hard work and earnestness were in. The pair also avoided the classic mistakes of overextending their resources, focusing instead on improving and iterating the Big Idea.

In a few short years, Google became the de facto standard of the digital in-crowd. Rave reviews in the press turned more and more people on to the service, and ordinary users shared their experiences with the company through word-of-mouth marketing. Within a few more years, Google was generating more than $50 billion in revenue by capturing a huge slice of the online advertising market.

Google’s meteoric rise did not occur without challenges, however. It was several years before the company actually made any money, and there was genuine concern amongst venture capitalists that Google’s growth could be unsustainable. That was partly why the company brought on Novell CEO Eric Schmidt in 2001 to provide, as Brin once painted it, “parental supervision.”

Schmidt initially thought that Page and Brin were arrogant, and at first his role was merely to keep an eye on the founders’ spending habits. But over time, he came to respect the verbal jousting and intellectual brinksmanship that were endemic to the company’s culture at the very top. It was through that same spirit of innovation and relentless improvement that the company grew from its developers’ garage into a global powerhouse, now the crown jewel of parent company Alphabet Inc., with headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company has thousands of employees worldwide and operates data centers all over the globe. Its products include the Android smartphone, Chrome laptops and Pixel mobile phones, as well as email, maps, productivity software and a variety of web-based apps. Its search engine remains its core business, but the company has expanded its horizons with the introduction of products as diverse as Google News, Gmail and the Google Drive cloud storage system.