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.
Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. 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.
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. 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. 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.
Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters. 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.
U.S. government contracts
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. In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets. 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. Following Google’s corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet’s Access division.
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. 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 November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom’s economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative.
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Mobile phones services are available from either Ooredoo or Vodafone Qatar. Gas cylinders are available from WOQOD petrol stations and various supermarkets. Electricity and water are supplied by the same company Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation, more widely known as Kahrama. If you prefer to search yourself you have several options. These furnished apartments offer cleaning and laundry services and allow long and short term stay. When the account is created, you can tap ‘+Post Ad’ and you are ready to go!
- For a small fee of 59 QAR, your ad will be displayed for 3 months, ensuring ample time to attract potential buyers.
- In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project—Project Vivian—to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions.
- 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.
- Sign in to your Google Account, and get the most out of all the Google services you use.
Corporate identity
Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. 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. 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. In September 2025 Google opened their £735m AI Centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and announced their plans for £5 bn investment in AI research, in the same month that Alphabet reached market capitalisation of $3 trillion.
This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said. In September 2019, Google’s chief executive daman game announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. 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.
Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company’s full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. 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. 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.
Google around the globe
The EU Court of Justice found that Google’s treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as “discriminatory”, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google’s senior management issued a “code red” and a “directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months”. In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries.
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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 the BBC, and is one of the world’s most valuable brands. Your Google Account gives you a safe, central place to store your personal information — like credit cards, passwords, and contacts — so it’s always available for you across the internet when you need it. For example, flight confirmations in your Gmail inbox will automatically sync with your Google Calendar and Google Maps to help you get to the airport on time.
Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators. 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. The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google’s total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. 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.
- It also stated that it is committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030.
- In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called “Project Bernanke” that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States. The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.
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. 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. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company.
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.
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. You can also control what data is saved in your account with easy on/off controls, and even delete your data by date, product, and topic.
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.