Google is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related

services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, c

loud computing, and software.[7] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords.[8
][9]
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students
at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but con
trol 56 of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorpor
ated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public
offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was
"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usef
ul,"[10] and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil."[11][12] In 2006 Google m
oved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex.
Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions
and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine. It offers online productiv
ity software including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive), an
office suite (Google Docs) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop p
roducts include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, an
d instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile ope
rating system and the browser-only Chrome OS[13] for a netbook known as a Chrome
book. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners wi
th major electronics manufacturers in production of its high-end Nexus devices a
nd acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012.[14] In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastruc
ture was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service
.[15]
The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data
centers around the world (as of 2007)[16] and to process over one billion search
requests[17] and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009
).[18][19][20][21] In December 2013 Alexa listed google.com as the most visited
website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top
one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger
.[22] Its market dominance has led to prominent media coverage, including critic
ism of the company over issues such as copyright, censorship, and privacy.[23][2
4]