Google is a big American company that works with technology. They invest money in things like searching the internet, cloud computing (using computer programs and data stored on the internet), and advertising. Google makes and improves many services and products you find on the internet. Most of the money Google makes comes from its advertising program called AdWords. Google is considered one of the five biggest companies in information technology, along with Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started the company while studying for their Ph.D. at Stanford University. People often call them the “Google Guys.” The company was officially created on September 4, 1998. They first offered shares to the public on August 19, 2004. On that day, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for the next 20 years, until 2024. From the beginning, the company’s main goal has been to organize all the information in the world and make it easy for everyone to find and use. One of Google’s engineers, Paul Buchheit, came up with a motto for the company: “Don’t be evil.” Since 2006, the company’s main office has been in Mountain View, California.
Google uses more than one million servers in data centers around the world. These servers process over ten billion search requests and twenty-four petabytes (a very large amount) of data from users. After Google was created, it grew very quickly. Because of this, Google has created, bought, and worked with other companies to offer many new products, in addition to its main service, the web search engine. The company offers online software like Gmail for email and social networking tools like Orkut and Google Buzz. Google also makes software for desktop computers, like the Google Chrome web browser, Picasa for managing and editing photos, and Google Talk for instant messaging. Google is especially known for the Android operating system, which is used in phones like the Nexus One and Motorola Android, as well as Chrome OS, which is still being developed and is known as the main operating system for the CR-48. Alexa says that Google.com is the most visited website on the internet. Other Google websites, like google.co.in and google.co.uk, are also among the top 100 websites. The same is true for Google’s YouTube and Blogger websites. According to BrandZ, Google is the most powerful brand in the world. Because Google’s services are so important, the company has been criticized for issues like privacy, copyright, and censorship. The CEO of Google is Sundar Pichai, who is originally from India but is now an American citizen.
Google’s Story
Google’s first homepage looked simple because the people who started it didn’t know much about HTML, which is the language used to make web pages.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in 1996 as a research project. They were students at Stanford University in California. Back then, search engines usually showed results by counting how many times a search word appeared on a web page. But Larry and Sergey thought a good search engine should look at how web pages are connected. They called this new idea PageRank. It figured out how important a website was by counting the number of web pages and how popular the pages that linked to it were.
In 1996, Robin Li of IDD Information Services created a search engine named “RankDex,” which employed a similar strategy. Li patented the RankDex technology and later founded Baidu in China based on it. At first, Page and Brin called their search engine “BackRub” because it looked at backlinks to decide which sites were important.
Later, they changed the name to Google. “Google” is a misspelling of the word “googol,” which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name “Google” shows that the company wants to provide a lot of information to people. In the beginning, Google ran on Stanford University’s website with the domain name google.stanford.edu. Google’s own domain name was registered on September 15, 1997. On September 4, 1998, it became a privately owned company. The first office was in a garage in Menlo Park, California, which belonged to Susan Wojcicki, a friend of theirs. Craig Silverstein, another PhD student, became the first employee.
Getting Money And Offering Stock To The Public
Before Google was officially a company, Andy Bechtolsheim, who helped start Sun Microsystems, gave Google $100,000 in August 1998. In early 1999, Brin and Page felt they were spending too much time on the search engine and not enough on their studies. So, they decided to sell it and offered it to George Bell, the CEO of Excite, for $1 million. He said no. Later, Vinod Khosla criticized his decision, even though Khosla had spoken to Brin and Page about buying the company for $750,000. At the time, Khosla was a venture capitalist at Excite. On June 7, 1999, it was announced that $25 million would be invested in the company by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, along with other major investors.
Google started selling its stock to the public (IPO) five years later, on August 19, 2004. The company sold 19,605,052 shares for $85 each. They used a special online auction to sell the shares. Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, who were in charge of the auction, created a system for it. The sale of $1.67 billion made Google’s value in the market more than $23 billion. Google kept control of most of the 271 million shares, and many Google employees quickly became rich on paper. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google at the time.
Some people worried that Google’s IPO (Initial Public Offering) would negatively affect the company’s culture. There were a few reasons why they thought this. For example, shareholders might pressure the company to reduce benefits for employees, especially since the company’s success had quickly made many employees wealthy on paper.
To address these concerns, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page assured potential investors in a report that the IPO would not change how the company operated. However, by 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources suggested that Google was moving away from its “anti-corporate, don’t be evil” philosophy. The company created a “Chief Culture Officer” position to maintain its unique culture. This person, who also served as the director of human resources, was responsible for developing and preserving the company’s core principles. They also focused on ensuring the company remained true to its values of a collaborative environment with a clear organizational structure.
Google has also faced accusations from former employees regarding gender discrimination and ageism.
Strong sales and revenue from online advertising led to good market performance for the remaining shares after the IPO. The stock price first reached $700 on October 31, 2007. This increase in stock price was mainly driven by individual investors, not large institutional investors or mutual funds. Google is currently listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, where many other major Silicon Valley companies are located. A year later, despite initial reluctance from Page and Brin, Google began selling advertisements related to search keywords. To keep the search page clean and fast, the ads were text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of bids and clicks, with a minimum bid of five cents per click.
This model of selling keyword-based advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com (later Overture Services), a spin-off of Bill Gross’s Idealab. Overture Services sued Google for allegedly violating its pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services was later acquired by Yahoo and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. The patent infringement case was settled out of court, with Google giving Yahoo! a portion of its common stock in exchange for a perpetual license to the patents.
At the same time, Google received a patent for its PageRank system. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and listed Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, needing more space, the company leased its current headquarters from Silicon Graphics at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California. Google’s headquarters is known as the Googleplex, playing on the word “googolplex,” which means 10 to the power of 10,000 (10^10000). Three years later, Google bought the office complex from Silicon Graphics for $319 million. By then, “Google” had become a commonly used verb. As a result, the word “google” was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition “to use the Google search engine to find information.”
Buying Companies And Working Together
Since 2001, Google has bought many companies, mainly focusing on small, new tech companies. In 2004, Google bought Keyhole, Inc. Keyhole had created software called Earth Viewer that showed a 3D view of the Earth. In 2005, Google renamed it Google Earth. In 2007, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. On April 13, 2007, Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. This helped Google get valuable relationships with DoubleClick’s web publishers and ad agencies. Later that year, Google bought GrandCentral for $50 million, which was later renamed Google Voice. On August 5, 2009, Google bought its first public company, video software maker On2 Technologies, for $106.5 million. Google also bought Aardvark, a social network search engine, for $50 million. Google said in its internal blog, “We are moving forward for cooperation so that we can see where we can take it.” In April 2010, Google announced it had bought a small hardware company called Agnilux.
Besides buying companies, Google has also worked with other organizations on things like research and advertising. In 2005, Google partnered with the NASA Ames Research Center to build a 1,000,000 square foot (93,000 square meter) office area. These offices would be used to research things like large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and space industry projects. In October of the same year, Google partnered with Sun Microsystems to share and distribute each other’s technologies. The company also partnered with Time Warner’s AOL to improve each other’s video search services. In 2005, Google also funded the “.mobi” top-level domain for mobile devices and worked with big companies like Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson. Google launched “AdSense for Mobile” to take advantage of the mobile advertising market. To expand its reach in the advertising world, Google and News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media made a $900 million deal to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site MySpace.
In October 2006, Google announced it would buy the video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google doesn’t provide detailed figures on how much it costs to run YouTube, and in a 2007 regulatory filing, Google called YouTube’s revenue “not material.” However, according to an article in Forbes magazine in June 2008, YouTube earned $200 million in 2008 from increased advertising sales. In 2007, Google sponsored the NORAD Tracks Santa, a service that claims to simulate Santa Claus’s journey on Christmas Eve. Google replaced the former sponsor AOL and launched “tracking Santa” in 3-D for the first time through Google Earth. NORAD Tracks Santa also got a new channel on Google-owned YouTube.
In 2008, Google partnered with GeoEye to launch a satellite that provides high-resolution (0.41-meter black and white and 1.65-meter color) images for Google Earth. This satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008. Also in 2008, Google announced a partnership with LIFE magazine to host a collection of their photographs. Some of these photos had never been published in the magazine. The images were watermarked and had copyright notices, even though some were in the public domain.
In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in renewable energy, spending $38.8 million on two wind energy farms in North Dakota. The company stated that these two farms would generate 169.5 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 55,000 homes. These farms, developed by NextEra Energy Resources, would reduce the use of fossil fuels in the area and provide benefits. NextEra Energy Resources sold Google a 20% stake in the project to raise more money for its development. Then, in 2010, Google acquired Global IP Solutions, a Norwegian company providing web-based teleconferencing and related services. This acquisition allowed Google to add telephone-style services to its product offerings. On May 27, 2010, Google announced the acquisition of mobile advertising network AdMob. This acquisition followed an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Google did not disclose the cost of the acquisition. In July 2010, Google agreed to buy 114 megawatts of energy from an Iowa wind farm for the next 20 years.
On April 4, 2011, The Globe and Mail reported that Google bid $900 million for six thousand Nortel Network patents. Google offered almost a billion dollars to get these patents.
Products And Services
Advertising
Google makes about 99% of its money from its advertising programs. In 2006, they made about $10.492 billion from ads and only $112 million from licenses and other things. Google is a big player in online advertising because it has created many new products. Using DoubleClick technology, Google shows users ads that are relevant to their interests.
Google Analytics helps website owners see how people use their websites, like how often people click on links.
Google Ads can be placed on other websites through a two-part program. Google AdWords lets advertisers show ads on Google’s network by paying per click or view. Google AdSense lets website owners show ads on their sites and earn money when people click on those ads.
One problem with Google’s advertising program is that Google struggles to stop click fraud. This is when people or computer programs click on ads without being interested in the product, which makes advertisers pay for nothing. Reports in 2006 said that about 14% to 20% of clicks were fake.
Another issue is with Google’s “search within a search” service. This service helps users search within a website. But when used for a specific company, it showed ads for competitors, which caused many users to leave the site.
Some advertisers also complain about Google’s censorship. For example, in February 2003, Google stopped showing ads for Oceana, a group that protested how a cruise ship treated wastewater. Google said that it didn’t accept ads that were against other people, groups, or organizations. This policy was later changed.
In June 2008, Google made a deal with Yahoo! to show Google ads on Yahoo!’s webpages. But this deal never happened because the U.S. Department of Justice thought it would create unfair competition. Google canceled the deal in November 2008.
To promote its products, Google created a website called Demo Slam. This website was made to show off the technology behind Google’s products. Each week, two teams compete to use Google’s technology in new ways. The Search Engine Journal said that Demo Slam is “a place where creative and tech-savvy people can make videos to explain the latest and greatest technology to the rest of the world.” In simple terms, Google made a site for people to show off cool things you can do with Google tech.
Google Search, a web search engine, is the company’s most popular service. In November 2009, comScore said that Google was the top search engine in the United States, with 65.6% of the market. Google indexes billions of web pages. This means it organizes them so users can find what they need by using keywords and operators. Even though it’s popular, Google Search has been criticized by some groups. For example, The New York Times complained in 2003 that Google’s caching of their site’s content violated their copyright.
However, a court ruled in favor of Google. Also, The Hacker Quarterly made a list of words that Google’s new instant search couldn’t find. Google Watch criticized Google’s PageRank system, saying it favored older websites over new ones. They also claimed Google was connected to the NSA and CIA. Despite the criticism, the basic search engine has expanded to include image search, Google News, Google Maps, and more. In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, where users could upload, find, and watch videos. In 2009, Google stopped allowing uploads to Google Video to focus on the search part. Google even created Google Desktop to search for files on your computer. Recently, Google partnered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to provide free information about patents and trademarks. Basically, Google lets you search for all kinds of things!
Google Books is another service run by Google that has caused some controversy. The company started scanning books and uploading either limited previews or full versions (with permission) to its book search engine. In 2005, the Authors Guild, a group representing 8000 American writers, sued Google in New York City over this service. Google said that this service followed copyright law. In 2009, Google limited its scanning to books from the USA, Britain, Australia, and Canada to reach a revised settlement. Also, in 2009, a court in Paris ruled that Google had to remove La Martinière’s (Éditions du Seuil) work from its database. Google plans to sell digital versions of new books to compete with Amazon.com. Similarly, in response to the new search engine Bing, Google updated its image search on July 21, 2010. Now, thumbnails expand when you hover over them. Also, starting July 23, 2010, dictionary definitions for some English words started appearing above the search results. In March 2011, Google changed its algorithm to focus on high-quality content. To sum it up, Google is always changing and adding new things to its search services.
Money And Numbers
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, makes over 80% of its money from Google ads. In 2023, these ads made $237 billion. Google has been the top company for online ads for over ten years. Google Search makes the most money. It brings in 71% of Google’s ad money and 57% of all of Alphabet’s money.
Tools To Help You Work
Besides its regular web search, Google has released many online tools to help people work. Gmail is a free email service from Google. It started on April 1, 2004, as a special program where people needed an invitation to join. On February 7, 2007, it became available to everyone. It left the special program stage on July 7, 2009, when 146 million people used it each month. Gmail was the first online email to offer one gigabyte of storage space. It was also the first to group emails about the same topic together, like a forum. Now, it offers over 7400 megabytes of free storage, and you can pay $0.25 per gigabyte per year for extra storage, from 20 GB to 16 terabytes. Gmail is also known for using Ajax, a programming trick that makes webpages interactive without needing to refresh. Some people have worried about Gmail because of possible data leaks, which is a risk with many online apps. People like Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft), Liz Figueroa, Mark Rasch, and the editors of Google Watch think that Gmail’s processing of emails is too much. But Google says that only the person who owns the account can read emails sent to or from Gmail, and they only use the information to make ads better.
Google Docs is part of Google’s group of tools to help people work. It lets people create, edit, and share documents online, like Microsoft Word. It was first called Writely, but Google bought it on March 9, 2006, and released it as a special program where people needed an invitation to join. On June 6, after buying Writely, Google made a test program for editing spreadsheets. On October 10, it was added to Google Docs. On September 17, 2007, a program for editing presentations was added, completing the set. On July 7, 2009, a full version of these services, along with Gmail, Google Calendar, and other products from Google Apps Suite, was released.
Business Products
Google’s search tool was showcased at the 2008 RSA Conference. Google entered the business (or enterprise) market in February 2002 with the Google Search Appliance, designed to give search technology to big organizations. Three years later, Google launched the Google Mini, aiming at smaller organizations. In late 2006, Google started selling the Custom Search Business Edition, giving customers an ad-free window into Google.com’s listings. In 2008, this became Google Site Search.
One of Google’s business products is Google Apps Premier Edition. This service, along with Google Apps Education Edition and the standard version, lets companies, schools, and other organizations use Google’s online applications (like Gmail and Google Docs) with their own domain names. The Premier Edition has more features than the standard version. These features include more disk space, API access, and premium support, at a cost of $50 per user per year. A large implementation of Google Apps was done at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, with 38,000 users. In the same year Google Apps launched, Google acquired Postini and rolled their security technology into Google Apps under the name Google Postini Services.
Google Translate is a server-side machine translation service. It can translate between 35 different languages. Browser extensions make using Google Translate from browsers even easier. The software uses statistical machine translation techniques, where the program learns from professional translation documents, especially from the United Nations and the European Parliament. Also, a “Suggest a better translation” feature is added to the translated text, allowing users to suggest changes if the translation is wrong or not good enough.
Google started the Google News service in 2002. The site said that the company had created a “highly unusual” site that provides “news compilation services by computer algorithms without any human intervention.” Google does not employ editors, managing editors, or executive editors. ” Compared to Yahoo! News, Google News uses less licensed news and instead displays headlines, snippets, and photos with links connecting to news and suggestions based on the topic. To reduce copyright issues, Google usually makes photos thumbnail-sized and places them next to headlines from other news sources on the same topic. However, Agence France-Presse (AFP) filed a lawsuit against Google in the federal court of the District of Columbia for copyright violations, which Google settled for an unknown amount under a rule that allowed AFP’s full-text articles to be licensed for use on Google News.
In 2006, Google said it would offer free wireless internet in San Francisco with help from EarthLink, an internet provider. Big phone companies like Comcast and Verizon didn’t like this. They said it was “unfair competition.” Also, they worried cities might break their promises and give these companies exclusive rights. In 2006, Google’s chief internet expert, Vint Cerf, spoke to Congress about net neutrality. He criticized these strategies, saying that almost half of all customers don’t have a real choice of internet providers. Currently, Google offers free Wi-Fi in its hometown of Mountain View, California.
A year later, there were reports that Google might release its own mobile phone, possibly to compete with the Apple iPhone. This project, called Android, became an operating system for mobile devices. Google released it as an open-source project under the Apache license after buying the company. Google gives developers a software kit to create apps for Android phones. In September 2008, T-Mobile released the first Android phone, the G1. On January 5, 2010, Google released its first Android phone under its own name, the Nexus One.
Google has also worked on other projects, including a new way to communicate and collaborate, a web browser, and a mobile operating system. The first of these was announced on May 27, 2009. Google Wave was described as a product that helps people connect and work together on the web. It was Google’s “re-thought e-mail” service, which improved communication with real-time editing, audio, video, other media, and extensions. Google Wave was in a preview mode, where users could test it by invitation. However, it was released to the public on May 19, 2010, at the Google I/O event. On September 1, 2008, Google announced the upcoming release of Google Chrome, an open-source web browser, which was released on September 2, 2008. The following year, on July 7, 2009, Google announced Google Chrome OS, an open-source, Linux-based operating system with only a web browser. It was designed for users to log in to their Google accounts.
Corporate Affairs And Culture
Google is known for having a relaxed and informal workplace culture. Fortune magazine ranked it as the best company to work for in 2007 and 2008 and fourth in 2009 and 2010. In 2010, Universum Communications’ talent attraction index named Google the world’s most attractive employer for students graduating from universities. Google’s corporate philosophy includes principles like “you can make money without doing evil,” “you can be serious without wearing a suit,” and “work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.”
Employees
New employees are called “Nooglers” and get to wear a beanie hat with a propeller on their first TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) meeting.
After Google’s initial public offering of stock, many early employees became wealthy. After the company’s IPO, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with CEO Eric Schmidt, asked for their base salary to be reduced to $1. They turned down many offers from the company to increase their pay, mainly because their income still came from owning Google shares. Before 2004, Schmidt was earning $250,000 per year, while Page and Brin were earning $150,000 each as salary.
Executives
In 2007 and early 2008, several top executives left Google. In October 2007, Gideon Yu, the former chief financial officer of YouTube, joined Facebook with Benjamin Ling, a senior engineer. In March 2008, Sheryl Sandberg, then vice president of online sales and operations, started working as the chief operating officer at Facebook, while Ash ElDifrawi, the former head of brand advertising, left Google to become the chief marketing officer at Netshops, an online retail company that was renamed Hayneedle in 2009. On April 4, 2011, Larry Page became the CEO of Google, and Eric Schmidt became the executive chairman.
Innovation
As a way to encourage innovation, Google uses a policy often called Innovation Time Off. This policy encourages Google engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on projects they are interested in. Some of Google’s new services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, came from these independent efforts. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, showed that more than half of the new products were created using Innovation Time Off at the time they were launched.
In March 2011, a consulting company called Universum released data showing that Google was ranked as the top ideal employer. About 25% of 10,000 young professionals surveyed chose Google as their first choice. This means that nearly twice as many young people chose Google as their second choice.
Googleplex Is Google’s First And Largest Corporate Campus
Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is named after a term that combines “Googleplex,” the name for a very large number, and “complex,” because the headquarters is a complex of buildings. The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old computer servers, and a projection of search queries on the wall. Hallways are filled with exercise balls and bicycles. Every employee can use the corporate recreation center. These recreation areas are spread throughout the campus and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, various video games, foosball, a grand piano, a billiard table, and ping pong.
Besides recreation rooms, there are also snack bars filled with various foods and drinks. In 2006, Google expanded its operations to New York City, opening a 311,000-square-foot (28,900-square-meter) office at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. This office was specifically designed for Google and is now home to Google’s largest advertising sales team, which has helped the company secure major partnerships. In 2003, Google added an engineering team to the New York City office, which has worked on over 100 engineering projects, such as Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others. It is estimated that Google pays $10 million per year in rent for this office.
The office’s functionality and design are similar to Google’s Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, ping-pong tables, and video game areas. In November 2006, Google opened a new office on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertising coding and smartphone applications and programs. By the end of 2006, Google had also established a new headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for its AdWords division. Additionally, Google has offices around the world, including in Atlanta, Austin, Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., in the United States.
Google’s New York City office is the workplace for Google’s largest ad sales team.
Google is taking steps to ensure its operations are environmentally friendly. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to meet about 30% of the campus’s energy needs. This is the largest solar power installation at any American corporate campus and one of the largest at any corporate site in the world. Additionally, in 2009, Google announced that it would use a herd of goats to trim the grass in the meadows around Googleplex. This reduces the risk of seasonal wildfires while also lowering the carbon footprint of mowing the grass. The idea of using goats to mow the grass was suggested by R. J. Widlar, an engineer who previously worked for National Semiconductor. However, Google has faced criticism from Harper’s Magazine for excessive energy use and for using the “Don’t Be Evil” motto and its energy-saving initiatives as a way to hide or compensate for the large amount of energy its servers require.
Google’s April Fool’s Jokes And Easter Eggs
Google often makes jokes on April Fool’s Day. For example, they once said that the Googleplex could use mind power to search the web. In 2007, Google announced a free internet service called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider). It said people could get online by putting one end of a fiber optic cable into their toilet. Also in 2007, Google’s Gmail page had an announcement for “Gmail Paper.” This service would let users print their emails and have them delivered. In 2008, Google announced “Gmail Custom Time,” which let users change the time an email was sent. In 2010, Google jokingly changed its name to Topeka to honor the city of Topeka, Kansas. The mayor had temporarily renamed the city “Google” to try to get Google to choose Topeka for its new Google Fiber project. In 2011, Google announced “Gmail Motion.” This was a way to control Gmail and the computer with body movements using a webcam.
Besides April Fool’s jokes, Google services also have many Easter eggs (hidden jokes or features). For example, Google’s search engine lets you choose languages like “Bork bork bork” (from the Swedish Chef), Pig Latin, “Hacker” (Leet speak), Elmer Fudd, and Klingon. Also, the search engine’s calculator gives the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” from the book ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ When you search for the word “recursion,” the spell-checker suggests the same word, creating a recurring (repeating) link. Similarly, when you search for “anagram” (rearranging letters of one word to make another), Google suggests, “Did you mean: nag a ram?” On Google Maps, if you ask for directions between two places separated by a large body of water (like Los Angeles and Tokyo), the directions say to “Swim across the Pacific Ocean.” During the 2010 FIFA World Cup, searches like “World Cup” or “FIFA” showed “Goooo…al!” instead of “Goooo…gle” at the bottom of the results page.
Charity
In 2004, Google created Google.org, a nonprofit with an initial fund of $1 billion for charity. Its mission is to raise awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that would get 100 miles per gallon. In 2004, Google chose Dr. Larry Brilliant as the executive director of the program, and currently, Megan Smith is the director of the program.
In 2008, Google announced its “Project 10^100,” which accepted ideas on how to help communities. Then, Google users could vote for their favorite idea. After two years of silence, during which people wondered what happened to the program, Google announced the winners. These winners, who had various plans from promoting non-profit education to a website that would make all legal documents public and online, were given $10 million.
In 2011, Google donated one million euros to the International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five years of the competition (2011-2015).
Network Neutrality
Google is a well-known supporter of network neutrality. According to Google’s guide on net neutrality:
Network neutrality means that internet users should control what they see and what applications they use on the internet. The internet has worked this way since it started. Basically, net neutrality is about equal access to the internet. We believe that broadband companies should not be allowed to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not allowed to tell users who they can call or what they can say, broadband companies should not be allowed to use their market power to control online activity.
On February 7, 2006, Vint Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet Protocol (IP) and then Google’s Vice President and “Chief Internet Evangelist,” testified before Congress. He said that “allowing broadband companies to control what people see and do online would violate the basic principles that have made the internet a success.”
Privacy
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said in an interview with the Financial Times in 2007, “Our goal is to empower Google users to ask questions like ‘What should I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job should I take?’” Continuing this idea, Schmidt said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2010, “I really think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions; they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
In December 2010, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt made the following statement regarding privacy issues: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the truth is that search engines—including Google—keep that information for some time, because in the United States, we are all subject to the Patriot Act, which might require authorities to get access to that information.” Privacy International ranked Google as a “Privacy Villain,” which is the lowest rating in their report. Google is the only company to have received that ranking on that list.
In 2010, Eric Schmidt said at a conference that “true transparency and no privacy” is the right way for the internet to grow. He said it’s dangerous to not be able to identify people online because of online threats. He suggested a system where everyone has a verified name because governments would want that. He also said that with enough data, like messages and location, and using AI, we can predict where someone is going. He claimed that if someone shows us 14 photos, we can identify them, and most people already have more than 14 photos on Facebook.
A nonprofit group called Public Information Research started Google Watch, a website that examines Google’s control, algorithms, and privacy issues. The site questioned Google’s use of cookies, which stored a unique ID for over 32 years, allowing Google to track user data. Google also faced criticism for its social network, Google Buzz, which automatically made Gmail users’ contact lists public unless they opted out. Additionally, Google was criticized for censoring certain sites in specific countries, like China. Until March 2010, Google followed China’s censorship rules, which were enforced by the “Great Firewall of China.” In 2010, leaked reports showed that Chinese government workers, security experts, and internet criminals hacked Google’s computers as part of a worldwide effort coordinated by the Chinese government.
Even though Google has a big impact on local and national policies, it doesn’t publicly share its political spending. In August 2010, New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio started a campaign to get Google to reveal its political spending.
From 2006 to 2010, Google Street View cars collected about 600 gigabytes of data from unencrypted public and private Wi-Fi networks in over 30 countries. This happened without telling the people affected or the Wi-Fi owners. A Google representative said they realized their data collection activities when they received an inquiry letter from German regulators. The representative also mentioned that this data was not used in Google’s search engine or other services. In response, a representative from Consumer Watchdog said Google doesn’t value people’s privacy. Google’s engineers collect all kinds of data until they are caught. Seeing potential legal punishments, Google stated that it would not destroy the unlawfully collected data until regulators permitted it to do so.
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