Google Wikipedia

<p>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. 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. In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, as of March 2019.update In 2012, the company ranked 2nd in campaign donations of technology and Internet sections.</p> <p>In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. 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. 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.</p> <p>In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media. 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. In 2025, Google announced SynthID Detector, a tool that uses watermarking to identify whether content such as text, images, audio, or video was generated using Google products.</p> <h2>More ways to search</h2> <p>One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites.</p> <p>Your Google Account helps you save time by automatically filling in passwords, addresses, and payment details using the information you’ve saved to your account. No matter which device or Google service you’re using, your account gives you a consistent experience you can customize and manage at any time. 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. Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA's massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. 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.</p> <p>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. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. 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. In May 2024, a misconfiguration in Google Cloud led to the accidental deletion of UniSuper's $135 billion Australian pension fund account, affecting over half a million members who were unable to access their accounts for a week. Google was grilled at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later.</p> <ul><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>No matter which device or Google service you’re using, your account gives you a consistent experience you can customize and manage at any time.</li><li>Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests.</li></ul> <p>Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each.</p> <p>When you sign in to your Google Account, all the Google services you use work together to help you <a href="https://vegas-casino-apk.com.in/en-in/">vegas casino apk</a> get more done. Your account helps you do more by personalizing your Google experience and offering easy access to your most important information from anywhere. Sign in to your Google Account, and get the most out of all the Google services you use. Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters.</p> <h2>Discover more ways to use AI in our products</h2> <p>The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In 2017, three women sued Google, accusing the company of violating California's Equal Pay Act by underpaying its female employees. It was ruled in 2025 by the Justice Department alongside 17 other states that Google operates a monopoly in online advertising technology. The DoJ also sought a ban on Google re-entering the browser market for five years and restrictions on its investments in rival search or AI technologies. In August 2024, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held a monopoly in online search and text advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.</p> <h2>Built-in security</h2> <p>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. 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. In December 2016, Google announced that—starting in 2017—it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices.</p> <h2>Products and services</h2> <p>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. 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.</p> <h2>Financial services</h2> <ul><li>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.</li><li>In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.</li><li>In 2025, Google announced SynthID Detector, a tool that uses watermarking to identify whether content such as text, images, audio, or video was generated using Google products.</li><li>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.</li></ul> <p>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. 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.</p> <h2>Corporate identity</h2> <p>In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. During 2025, Google engaged in a $45 million, six-month contract with Israel to run advertising campaigns. Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy.</p> <div style='text-align:center'></div> <p>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. In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history. This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets. 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.</p> <p>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. 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.</p> <h2>U.S. government contracts</h2> <p>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. 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. 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.</p> <p>Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma. 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". 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.</p> <h2>Search Through Time</h2> <p>The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. 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.</p> <p>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. Other Palestinian employees have described an "institutionalised bias" within the company. According to Google employees, the Israeli military could use this technology to expand its surveillance of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. On May 1, 2023, Google placed an ad against the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630, an anti-disinformation law that was about to be approved, on its search homepage in Brazil, calling on its users to ask congressional representatives to oppose the legislation. 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.</p> <p>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. 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".</p>