Google is a multinational technology company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. Originally a search engine company, Google has expanded into virtually every area of computing and has become one of the most influential technology companies in history.
Founding and Growth
Page and Brin developed the PageRank algorithm, which ranked web pages by the number and quality of links pointing to them. This approach produced dramatically better search results than existing engines[1].
Google incorporated in 1998 and grew rapidly, becoming the dominant search engine within a few years. The company went public in 2004 and reorganized under the parent company Alphabet Inc. in 2015.
Computing Contributions
Google has made significant contributions to computing infrastructure and tools:
- MapReduce (2004): Programming model for processing large datasets
- BigTable (2006): Distributed storage system
- TensorFlow (2015): Open-source machine learning framework
- Go programming language (2009): Designed by Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer
- Kubernetes (2014): Container orchestration system, now industry-standard
- Android: Mobile operating system powering most smartphones worldwide
- Chrome/Chromium: Web browser and open-source browser engine
Research and Open Source
Google Research has published influential papers on distributed systems, machine learning, and natural language processing. The company has open-sourced many tools that have become industry standards.
Sources
- Wikipedia. “Google.” History and overview of Google.