Google LLC is an American
multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services
and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine,
cloud computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the Big Four
technology companies alongside Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
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 California privately held company on September 4,
1998, in California. Google was then reincorporated in Delaware on October 22,
2002. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and
Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the
Google plex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various
interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's leading
subsidiary and will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet
interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page who
became the CEO of Alphabet.
The company's rapid growth since incorporation
has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond
Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers services designed for
work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email
(Gmail), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage
(Google Drive), instant messaging and video chat (Duo, Hangouts, Meet),
language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps,
Waze, Google Earth, Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google
Keep), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos). The company leads the
development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web
browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome
browser. Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it
partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Nexus
devices, and it released multiple hardware products in October 2016, including
the Google Pixel smart phone, Google Home smart speaker, Google Wifi mesh
wireless router, and Google Daydream virtual reality headset. Google has also
experimented with becoming an Internet carrier (Google Fiber, Google Fi, and
Google Station).
Google.com is the most visited
website in the world. Several other Google services also figure in the top 100
most visited websites, including YouTube and Blogger. Google was the most
valuable brand in the world in 2017 (surpassed by Amazon), but has received
significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance,
antitrust, censorship, and search neutrality.
HISTORY
Google began in January 1996 as a
research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students
at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The project initially involved
an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead
programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine,
but he left before Google was officially founded as a company; Hassan went on
to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.
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. They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined a website's
relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked
back to the original site. Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the
code to implement Page's ideas.
Page and Brin originally nicknamed
the new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks
to estimate the importance of a site. Hassan as well as Alan Steremberg were
cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. 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. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were
also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar
page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by
Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page's PageRank patent including a citation to
Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search
engine Baidu.
Eventually, they changed the name
to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the
word "googol", the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked
to signify that the search engine was intended to provide
The domain name for Google was
registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September
4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park,
California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as
the first employee.
Google was initially funded by an
August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun
Microsystems; the money was given before Google was incorporated. Google
received money from three other angel investors in 1998: Amazon.com founder
Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, and
entrepreneur Ram Shriram. Between these initial investors, friends, and family
Google raised around 1 million dollars, which is what allowed them to open up
their original shop in Menlo Park, California.
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.
GROWTH
In March 1999, the company moved
its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent
Silicon Valley technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial
opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an
uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000,
it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider
for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.
In 2003, after outgrowing two other
locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600
Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as
the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a
googol zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319
million. By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into
everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary,
denoted as: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the
Internet". Additionally, in 2001 Google's Investors felt the need to have
a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the Chairman
and CEO of Google
Initial public
offering
Google's initial public offering
(IPO) took place five years later, on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page,
Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years,
until the year 2024. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price
of $85 per share. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system
built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale
of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
In October 2006, Google announced
that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google
stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. On April 13, 2007,
Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion,
transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web
publishers and advertising agencies.
In 2005, The Washington Post
reported on a 700 percent increase in third-quarter profit for Google, largely
thanks to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from
newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. In May 2011, the number
of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time.
By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To
handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with some
several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle
the ever changing workload more efficiently.
On August 15, 2011, Google made its
largest-ever acquisition to date when it announced that it would acquire
Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. This purchase was made in part to help
Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and
wireless technologies, to help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes
with other companies, mainly Apple and Microsoft, and to allow it to continue
to freely offer Android.
2012 onward
The year 2012 was the first time
that Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue, generating $38 billion the
previous year. In January 2013, then-CEO Larry Page commented, "We ended
2012 with a strong quarter ... Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8%
quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last
year – not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half."
On January 26, 2014, Google
announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held
artificial intelligence company from London. Technology news website Recode
reported that the company was purchased for $400 million though it was not
disclosed where the information came from. A Google spokesman would not comment
of the price. The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in the
artificial intelligence and robotics community.
According to Interbrand's annual
Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in
the world (behind Apple Inc.) in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation
of $133 billion.
On August 10, 2015, Google
announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called
Alphabet. Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, and will continue to be
the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the
restructure, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who
became CEO of Alphabet.
As of October 2016, Google
operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries. Alexa, a company that monitors
commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the
world. Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited
websites, including YouTube and Blogger.
On August 8, 2017, Google fired
employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company which
argued that bias and "Google's ideological echo chamber" clouded
their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological
factors, not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less
interested than men in technical positions. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused
Damore in violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender
stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day. New York
Times columnist David Brooks argued Pichai had mishandled the case, and called
for his resignation.
Between 2018 and 2019, tensions
between the company's leadership and its workers escalated as staff protested
company decisions on internal sexual harassment, a censored Chinese search
engine, and a military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as
areas of revenue growth for the company. On October 25, 2018, The New York
Times published the exposé, "How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father
of Android’". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees
have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct. On
November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a
global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment
complaints. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating
against internal activists.
On March 19, 2019, Google
announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming
platform called Stadia.
On June 3, 2019, the United
States Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google for
antitrust violations.
In December 2019, it was reported
that former PayPal Chief Operating Officer Bill Ready would become Google's new
commerce chief. Ready's role won't be directly involved with Google Pay.
In April 2020, due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. Such
measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020, except for of
a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and pace of
investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential
marketing and travel.
Products and services
Search engine
Google indexes billions of web
pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use
of keywords and operators. 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%. In May
2017, Google enabled a new "Personal" tab in Google Search, letting
users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including
email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos.
Google launched its Google News
service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from
various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, a service which searches the
text found in books in its database and shows limited previews or and the full
book where allowed.
Advertising
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 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was
derived from its advertising programs. In addition to its own algorithms for
understanding search requests, Google uses technology from the company
DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search
context and the user history.
In 2007, Google launched
"AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile
advertising market.
Google Analytics allows website
owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by
examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on
third-party websites in a two-part program. Google Ads allows advertisers to
display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a
cost-per-click scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website
owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every
time ads are clicked. One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility
of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on
advertisements without being interested in the product, causing the advertiser
to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claimed that
approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid. Google
Search Console (rebranded from Google Webmaster Tools in May 2015) allows
webmasters to check the sitemap, crawl rate, and for security issues of their
websites, as well as optimize their website's visibility.
Consumer services
Web-based services
Google offers Gmail for email,
Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling, Google Maps for mapping, navigation and
satellite imagery, Google Drive for cloud storage of files, Google Docs, Sheets
and Slides for productivity, Google Photos for photo storage and sharing,
Google Keep for note-taking, Google Translate for language translation, YouTube
for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for managing public business
information, and Duo for social interaction. In March 2019, Google unveiled a
cloud gaming service named Stadia.
Software
Google develops the Android
mobile operating system, as well as its smartwatch, television, car, and
Internet of things-enabled smart devices variations.
It also develops the Google
Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, an
operating system based on Chrome.
Hardware
In January 2010, Google released
Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand, "Nexus". It
spawned a number of phones and tablets under the "Nexus" branding
until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called
Pixel.
In 2011, the Chromebook was
introduced, described as a "new kind of computer" running Chrome OS.
In July 2013, Google introduced
the Chromecast dongle, that allows users to stream content from their smartphones
to televisions.
In June 2014, Google announced
Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets user place their
smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality (VR) media.
The Pixel and Pixel XL
smartphones with the Google Assistant, a next-generation contextual voice assistant,
built-in.
Google Home, an Amazon Echo-like
voice assistant placed in the house that can answer voice queries, play music,
find information from apps (calendar, weather etc.), and control third-party
smart home appliances (users can tell it to turn on the lights, for example).
The Google Home line also includes variants such as the Google Home Hub, Google
Home Mini, and Google Home Max
Daydream View virtual reality
headset that lets Android users with compatible Daydream-ready smartphones put
their phones in the headset and enjoy VR content.
Google Wifi, a connected set of
Wi-Fi routers to simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi.
Enterprise services
Main articles: G Suite and Google
Cloud Platform
G Suite is a monthly subscription
offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a collection of
Google's services, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs, Google Sheets
and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names,
and 24/7 support.
On September 24, 2012, Google
launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator
providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to
startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships.
Presently, there are 7 Campus locations in Berlin, London, Madrid, Seoul, São
Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw.
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. 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". 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.
Internet services
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. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet
Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division.
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.
In September 2016, Google began
its Google Station initiative, a project for public Wi-Fi at railway stations
in India. Caesar Sengupta, VP for Google's next billion users, told The Verge
that 15,000 people get online for the first time thanks to Google Station and
that 3.5 million people use the service every month. The expansion meant that
Google was looking for partners around the world to further develop the
initiative, which promised "high-quality, secure, easily accessible
Wi-Fi". By December, Google Station had been deployed at 100 railway
stations, and in February, Google announced its intention to expand beyond railway
stations, with a plan to bring citywide Wi-Fi to Pune.
Other products
In May 2011, Google announced
Google Wallet, a mobile application for wireless payments.
In 2013, Google launched Google
Shopping Express, a delivery service initially available only in San Francisco
and Silicon Valley.
Corporate affairs
Finance
Further information: Corporation
tax in the Republic of Ireland § Multinational tax schemes, and Google tax
Google's initial public offering
(IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052
shares at a price of $85 per share. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a
market capitalization of more than $23 billion. 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 surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as
opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. GOOG shares split
into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares. 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. These ticker symbols now
refer to Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, since the fourth quarter of
2015.
The corporation's consolidated
revenue for the third quarter of 2013 was reported in mid-October 2013 as
$14.89 billion, a 12 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.
Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total,
with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. By January
2014, Google's market capitalization had grown to $397 billion.
Google uses various tax avoidance
strategies. Out of the five largest American technology companies, it pays the
lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues. Google between 2007
and 2010 saved $3.1 billion in taxes by shuttling non-U.S. profits through
Ireland and the Netherlands and then to Bermuda. Such techniques lower its
non-U.S. tax rate to 2.3 per cent, while normally the corporate tax rate in for
instance the UK is 28 per cent. This has reportedly sparked a French
investigation into Google's transfer pricing practices.
Google said it overhauled its
controversial global tax structure and consolidated all of its intellectual
property holdings back to the US.
Google Vice-President Matt
Brittin testified to the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons
that his UK sales team made no sales and hence owed no sales taxes to the UK.
In January 2016, Google reached a settlement with the UK to pay £130m in back
taxes plus higher taxes in future. In 2017, Google channeled $22.7 billion from
the Netherlands to Bermuda to reduce its tax bill.
In 2013, Google ranked 5th in
lobbying spending, up from 213th in 2003. In 2012, the company ranked 2nd in
campaign donations of technology and Internet sections.
Corporate identity
Main articles: History of Google
§ Name, Google (verb), Google logo, Google Doodle, List of Google April Fools'
Day jokes, and List of Google Easter eggs
The name "Google"
originated from a misspelling of "googol", which refers to the number
represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their
original paper on PageRank: "We chose our systems name, Google, because it
is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of
building very large-scale search engines." Having found its way
increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to
the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in
2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on
the Internet." Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to
organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and
useful", and its unofficial slogan
is "Don't be evil". In October 2015, a related motto was adopted in
the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right
thing". The original motto was retained in the code of conduct of Google,
now a subsidiary of Alphabet.
The original Google logo was
designed by Sergey Brin. Since 1998, Google has been designing special,
temporary alternate logos to place on their homepage intended to celebrate
holidays, events, achievements and people. The first Google Doodle was in honor
of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and
Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed.
Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry
and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in
2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team
of employees termed "Doodlers".
Google has a tradition of creating
April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on April 1, 2000 was Google MentalPlex which
allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. 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.
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.[196] When searching for the word
"anagram," meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form
other valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays "Did you mean: nag
a ram?"
Workplace culture
On Fortune magazine's list of the
best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012, and
fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's
most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications
talent attraction index.[203] Google's corporate philosophy includes principles
such as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be
serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the
challenge should be fun."
As of December 2018, Google has
98,771 employees. Google's 2017 diversity report states that 31 percent of its
workforce are women and 69 percent are men, with the ethnicity of its workforce
being predominantly white (56%) and Asian (35%). Within tech roles, however, 20
percent were women; and 25 percent of leadership roles were held by women.
Google's employees are hired
based on a hierarchical system. 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 a motivation
technique, Google uses a policy known as Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers
are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them.
Some of Google's services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense
originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University,
Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice-President of Search Products and User Experience
until July 2012, showed that half of all new product launches in the second
half of 2005 had originated from the Innovation Time Off.
In 2005, articles in The New York
Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its
anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. 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. Google has also faced allegations of
sexism and ageism from former employees. In 2013, a class action against
several Silicon Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged
"no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of
high-tech employees.
Office locations
Further information: Googleplex
Google's headquarters in Mountain
View, California is referred to as "the Googleplex", a play on words
on the number googolplex and the headquarters itself being a complex of
buildings. Internationally, Google has over 78 offices in more than 50
countries.
In 2006, Google moved into about
300,000 square feet (27,900 m2) of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth
Avenue in Manhattan. The office was designed and built specially for Google,
and houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in
securing large partnerships. In 2010, Google bought the building housing the
headquarter, in a deal that valued the property at around $1.9 billion. In
March 2018, Google's parent company Alphabet bought the nearby Chelsea Market
building for $2.4 billion. The sale is touted as one of the most expensive real
estate transactions for a single building in the history of New York. In
November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to
a capacity of 12,000 employees. The same December, it was announced that a $1
billion, 1,700,000-square-foot (160,000 m2) headquarters for Google would be
built in Manhattan's Hudson Square neighborhood. Called Google Hudson Square,
the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees
working in New York City.
By late 2006, Google established
a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In November
2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing
on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and
programs. Other office locations in the U.S. include Atlanta, Georgia; Austin,
Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California;
Seattle, Washington; Kirkland, Washington; Birmingham, Michigan; Reston, Virginia,
and Washington, D.C.
Infrastructure
Further information: Google data
centers
Google data centers are located
in North and South America, Asia, and Europe. 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. Traditionally, Google relied on parallel computing on commodity
hardware like mainstream x86 computers (similar to home PCs) to keep costs per
query low. In 2005, it started developing its own designs, which were only
revealed in 2009.
In the late 2010s, Google began
to build its own private submarine communications cables. The first, named
Curie, connects California with Chile and is to be completed in 2019. The second
fully Google-owned undersea cable, named Dunant, connects the United States
with France and is planned to begin operation in 2020.
Environment
In October 2006, the company
announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts
of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy
needs. The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S.
corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.
Since 2007, Google has aimed for carbon neutrality in regard to its operations.
Google disclosed in September
2011 that it "continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000
homes", almost 260 million watts or about a quarter of the output of a
nuclear power plant. 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. Google said that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by
renewable fuels in 2010. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of
electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the
total electricity consumption by Google.
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 company announced the two locations will
generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In February
2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FERC granted Google an
authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The corporation exercised
this authorization in September 2013 when it announced it would purchase all
the electricity produced by the not-yet-built 240-megawatt Happy Hereford wind
farm.
In July 2010, Google signed an
agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of energy for 20 years.
In December 2016, Google
announced that—starting in 2017—it will power all of its data centers, as well
as all of its offices, from 100% renewable energy. The commitment will make
Google "the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments
reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy". Google
also stated that it does not count that as its final goal; it says that
"since the wind doesn't blow 24 hours a day, we'll also broaden our
purchases to a variety of energy sources that can enable renewable power, every
hour of every day". Additionally, the project will "help support
communities" around the world, as the purchase commitments will
"result in infrastructure investments of more than $3.5 billion
globally", and will "generate tens of millions of dollars per year in
revenue to local property owners, and tens of millions more to local and
national governments in tax revenue".
In November 2017, Google bought
536 megawatts of wind power. The purchase made the firm reach 100% renewable
energy. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in
Iowa and one in Oklahoma.
In September 2019, Google's chief
executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the
biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. This will grow their green
energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the
company said.
Google donates to politicians who
deny climate change including Jim Inhofe as well as sponsoring climate change
denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive
Enterprise Institute.
Philanthropy
Main article: Google.org
In 2004, Google formed the
not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion.
The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change,
global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to
develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per
gallon. Google hired Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in
2004 and Megan Smith has since replaced him as director.
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. After two years of
silence, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google
revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to
various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a
website that intends to make all legal documents public and online.
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.[268] In 2011, Google donated 1 million euros to International
Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International
Mathematical Olympiads (2011–2015). In July 2012, Google launched a
"Legalize Love" campaign in support of gay rights.
Cri criticism and controversy
Main articles: Criticism of
Google, Censorship by Google, and Privacy concerns regarding Google
San Francisco activists protest
privately owned shuttle buses that transport workers for tech companies such as
Google from their homes in San Francisco and Oakland to corporate campuses in
Silicon Valley.
Google's market dominance has led
to prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues
such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of
search results and content,and privacy. Other criticisms include alleged misuse
and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property,
concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, and the
energy consumption of its servers, as well as concerns over traditional
business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, anti-competitive
practices, and patent infringement.
Google formerly adhered to the
Internet censorship policies of China, enforced by means of filters
colloquially known as "The Great Firewall of China", but no longer
does so. As a result, all Google services except for Chinese Google Maps are
blocked from access within mainland China without the aid of VPNs, proxy servers,
or other similar technologies. The Intercept reported in August 2018 that
Google is developing for the People's Republic of China a censored version of
its search engine (known as Dragonfly) "that will blacklist websites and
search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful
protest". However, the project had been withheld due to privacy concerns.
Following media reports about
PRISM, NSA's massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several
technology companies were identified as participants, including Google.
According to leaks of said program, Google joined the PRISM program in 2009.
Google has worked with the United
States Department of Defense on drone software through the 2017 "Project
Maven" that could be used to improve the accuracy of drone strikes.
Thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, have signed a letter
urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end a controversial contract with the
Pentagon. In response to the backlash, Google ultimately decided to not renew
their DoD contract, set to expire in 2019.
Shona Ghosh, a journalist for
Business Insider, noted that an increasing digital resistance movement against
Google has grown. A major hub for critics of Google in order to organize to
abstain from using Google products is the Reddit page for the subreddit
/r/degoogle.
In July 2018, Mozilla Program
Manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube
performance on Firefox.
In April 2019 former Mozilla
executive Jonathan Nightingale accused Google of intentionally and systematically
sabotaging the Firefox browser over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's
adoption.
In November 2019, the Office for
Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services began investigation
into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the "mass collection of
individuals’ medical records" complied with HIPAA. According to The Wall
Street Journal, Google commenced the project in secret, in 2018, with St.
Louis-based healthcare company Ascension.
Litigation
Main article: Google litigation
Google has been involved in a
number of lawsuits including the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation which
resulted in Google being one of four companies to pay a $415 million settlement
to employees.
On June 27, 2017, the company
received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union for
"promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search
results." Commenting on the penalty, New Scientist magazine said:
"The hefty sum – the largest ever doled out by the EU's competition
regulators – will sting in the short term, but Google can handle it. Alphabet,
Google’s parent company, made a profit of $2.5 billion (€2.2 billion) in the
first six weeks of 2017 alone. The real impact of the ruling is that Google must
stop using its dominance as a search engine to give itself the edge in another
market: online price comparisons." The company disputed the ruling. The
hearing at the General Court of Luxembourg was scheduled for 2020. The court is
going to deliver the ultimate judgment by the end of the year.
On July 18, 2018, the European
Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The
abuse of dominant position has been referred to Google's constraint applied on
Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on
Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On October 9, 2018, Google
confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court of the European
Union.
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. The judgment claimed
Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting
data to personalize advertising. Google issued a statement saying it was
“deeply committed” to transparency and was “studying the decision” before
determining its response.
On March 20, 2019, the European
Commission imposed a €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion) fine on Google for
preventing rivals from being able to “compete and innovate fairly” in the
online advertising market. European Union 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. Kent Walker,
Google's senior vice-president of global affairs, said the company had “already
made a wide range of changes to our products to address the Commission’s
concerns,” and that "we'll be making further updates to give more visibility
to rivals in Europe."
On July 25, 2019, presidential
hopeful Tulsi Gabbard sued Google for blocking her ads after the presidential
debate when she became one of the most searched items on the search engine.
DeGoogle movement
Main article: DeGoogle
The term "DeGoogle" has
grown in use as privacy activists urge users to stop using Google products
entirely due to growing privacy concerns. The term refers to the act of
removing Google from your life.
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