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.

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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. In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. The company’s fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York (US), Bude (UK) and Bilbao (Spain), and is expected to become operational in 2022.

  • 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”.
  • According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension.
  • Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport.
  • It does this with Google Analytics, which sends data back to Google whenever someone visits a website.
  • 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.

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. 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. The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway. 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. 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.

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On March 20, 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion) fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to “compete and innovate fairly” in the online advertising market. 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”. 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. 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. On March 15, 2016, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 360 Suite, “a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers” which can be integrated with BigQuery on the Google Cloud Platform.

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. On October 8, 2024, The U.S. government suggested it could request Google to divest parts of its business, such as the Chrome browser and Android, due to its alleged monopoly in online search. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on October 20, 2020, asserting that it has illegally maintained its monopoly position in web search and search advertising.

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.

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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. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company’s tools, including AI technology. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google’s senior management issued a “code red” and a “directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months”.

The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. It also stated that it is committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030. This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said. In September 2019, Google’s chief executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history.

Release:

Google has a search engine called Google Search, and a browser called Google Chrome (or Chrome for short). Because more than half of people on the web use it, “google” has also been used to mean “to search the web”. Known for creating and running one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web, also known as the (WWW). For the search engine called Google, see Google Search. 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. When you sign in to your Google Account, all the Google services you use work together to help you get more done.

  • 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 September 2020, Google announced it had retroactively offset all of its carbon emissions since the company’s foundation 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.
  • In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees.
  • 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.
  • On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced.

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In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, as of March 2019.update In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues.

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. On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.

Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region’s specific needs and training local talent. In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom’s economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. 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.

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. Sign in to your Google Account, and get the most out of all the Google services you use. Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings.

Since June 1, 2016, Google has been owned by a holding company called Alphabet Inc.. It has a special group known as the Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps make contracts, helps to make accounts better and gives engineering help. In February 1999, the company moved to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California, and then later moved to Googleplex. They made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998, at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Google Search can find pictures, videos, news, Usenet newsgroups, and things to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web pages on its database, 880 million pictures and 845 million Usenet messages—six billion things.

The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together pin up online at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company.

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 2023, Google released NotebookLM, an online tool for synthesizing documents using Gemini. 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. 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. Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.

In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia. Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020, except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and pace of investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel.

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. 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. After some additional small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

As of September 30, 2020,update Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed “Doodlers”.