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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. In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy. 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.

Google

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. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace”, and he was fired on the same day.

• 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 August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
• In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota.
• In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees.
• Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy.

Office locations

• 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.
• 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.
• In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees.
• In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India.

Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. Google reportedly said “the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service.” In July 2025, the U.S. Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. 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.

U.S. government contracts

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.

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. 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 of September 30, 2020,update Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google.

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. 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.

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 judgment claimed Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting data to personalize advertising. On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to “non-public” Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. In September 2024, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices in the online advertising technology market, potentially harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones.

PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu. 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. 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. In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon.

Corporate identity

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. 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.

United States

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. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed “Doodlers”. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. On the list of largest technology companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues.

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. Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers. A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites.

Initial public offering

In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. 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 new campus, reported to be the company’s largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City.

Search anything, effortlessly

Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA’s vegas casino 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. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway.

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. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google’s constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for “promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results”. Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari.

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. 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.