Since 2015, Google has been a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet, Inc. More than 70% of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. It is one of the world’s most prominent brands. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.

Google began as an online search firm, but it now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from e-mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers. In addition, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put the company in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high-tech marketplace, along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Despite its myriad of products, the original search tool remains the core of Google’s success. In 2016 Alphabet earned nearly all of its revenue from Google advertising based on users’ search requests.

Since 2015, Google has been a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet, Inc. More than 70% of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience.

Early investment, rapid growth, and a 2004 IPO

In mid-1998 Brin and Page began receiving outside financing. (One of their first investors was Andy Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc.). They ultimately raised about $1 million from investors, family, and friends and set up shop in Menlo Park, California, under the name Google, which was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeroes).

By mid-1999, when Google received a $25 million round of venture capital funding, it was processing 500,000 queries per day. Activity began to explode in 2000, when Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo!. By 2004, when Yahoo! dispensed with Google’s services, users were searching on Google 200 million times a day. That growth only continued; by the end of 2011, Google was handling some three billion searches per day. The company’s name became so ubiquitous that it entered the lexicon as a verb. To google became a common expression for searching the Internet.