The company went public via an initial public offering IPO in In , Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. The company has since rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services beyond Google Search , many of which hold dominant market positions. Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide followed by Facebook and Twitter now known as X.
Google is also the largest search engine , mapping and navigation application , email provider , office suite , online video platform , photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system , web browser , machine learning framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the world as measured by market share. The company has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns , tax avoidance , censorship , search neutrality , antitrust and abuse of its monopoly position.
On August 5, , D. Circuit Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over Internet search. 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. Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
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 Eventually, they changed the name to Google ; the name of the search engine was a misspelling of the word googol , [ 23 ] [ 40 ] [ 41 ] a very large number written 10 1 followed by zeros , picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. The meeting was set for 8 a. Andy briefly tested a demo of the website, liked what he saw, and then went back to his car to grab the check. Google received money from two other angel investors in Amazon. Shriram knew Bezos because Amazon had acquired Junglee, at which Shriram was the president.
