Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in 1995. By 1996, they had built a search engine (initially called BackRub) that used links to determine the importance of a individual web

Larry and Sergey named the search engine they built “Google,” a play on the word “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google Inc. was born in 1998, when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to that entity—which until then didn’t exist.

It’s really the people that make Google the kind of company it is. We hire people who are smart and determined, and we favor ability over experience. Although Googlers share common goals and visions for the company.

We’ve come a long way from the dorm room and the garage. We moved into our headquarters in Mountain View, California—better known as the Googleplex—in 2004. Today Google has more than 70 offices in more than 40 countries around the globe.

Though no two Google offices are the same, visitors to any office can expect to find a few common features: murals and decorations expressing local personality; Googlers sharing cubes, yurts and "huddles"; video games, pool tables and pianos; cafes and "microkitchens" stocked with healthy food; and good old fashioned whiteboards for spur-of-the-moment brainstorming.

products and services

We provide a variety of services for people and businesses. Here's a glimpse at what we offer.

Larry Page, our co-founder and CEO, once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” Since he spoke those words Google has grown to offer products beyond search, but the spirit of what he said remains. With all our technologies—from search to Chrome to Gmail—our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to find the information you need and get the things you need to do done.

This means making search smarter and faster, so it can understand that when you type [jaguar] you’re looking for the car, not photos of the animal. It means showing you when your friends like an ad or a search result, so that you know it might be valuable. It means making our products work intuitively, so that you can share documents with Gmail contacts without having to copy and paste, and open the same tabs on your Android phone that you have open on your Chrome browser on your desktop. Above all, it means making our products work better so that people can spend time on the stuff they’re good at—like enjoying time with family, camping in the wilderness, painting a picture or throwing a party. We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it.

Find a list of all our products »