Google

History

Early years

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with additional contribution from Scott Hassan. Page and Brin published their research, along with

Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd, as the PageRank algorithm and Stanford owned the patent. PageRank determines a website's relevance by the pages that linked back to the original site. Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas. Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written 10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to search a large number of websites.

Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold Granite Systems, the company he co-founded with Andy Bechtolsheim, to Cisco for $220 million. Cheriton arranged a meeting at his home in Palo Alto with Page, Brin, and Bechtolsheim. After a brief meeting which included a demo of the website Cheriton and Bechtolsheim agreed to fund Page and Brin's company approximately $200,000 investment each.

Google received money from two other angel investors in 1998, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram. Page and Brin had first approached Shriram, who was a venture capitalist, for funding and counsel, and Shriram invested $250,000 in Google in February 1998. Bezos asked Shriram to meet Google's founders and they met six months after Shriram had made his investment. Between these initial investors, friends, and family, Google raised approximately $1,000,000, to fund their original shop in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

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.

Growth

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi. Google's focus on search differentiated it from competitors like AOL and Yahoo which focused on creating portals and maximizing the time users spent in their walled garden.

In 2001, Google's investors felt the need to have strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google. Schmidt was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. 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 someone with a similar vision and engineering aptitude. Some investors and employees believed that Brin and Page did not want to bring in an outside CEO. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even threatened to demand that Google repay Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive officer, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Schmidt agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his commitment and to provide funds Google needed.

In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex. Three years later, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million. By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet".

Initial public offering

On August 19, 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public offering. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the five-letter ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.

The company's code of conduct highlighted the motto "Don't be evil". They stated, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."

Google has a dual-class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page said in the prospectus that Google has "a dual-class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me."

Acquisitions

Google sold more shares the following year to fund acquisitions. On October 9, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

Google's advertising revenue was challenged in 2006 when some advertisers declined to purchase display ads. The company leadership was split on how to handle trade-offs between privacy and advertising value. DoubleClick was known in the industry for the value its cookies brought to the advertising market. In 2007, Google agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion and completed the acquisition on March 11, 2008. After the acquisition, Google was convinced to support advertisers tracking preferences.

Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently.

In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies, mainly Apple and Microsoft, and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.

In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million. While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service.

Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official public statement, Page explained that the "health and well-being" company would focus on "the challenge of ageing and associated diseases".

On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the price. In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go.

Alphabet

On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Page, who became CEO of Alphabet.

Between 2018 and 2019, tensions between the company's leadership and its workers escalated as staff protested company decisions on internal sexual harassment, Dragonfly, a censored Chinese search engine, and Project Maven, a military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue growth for the company. On October 25, 2018, The New York Times published the exposé, "How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the 'Father of Android'". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct. On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints. CEO Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the protests. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists.

On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia. In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for Ubisoft ports on Google Stadia. Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such as Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia.

On June 3, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google for antitrust violations. This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets. In December 2019, former PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready became Google's new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved with Google Pay.

In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. These 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. Most employees were also working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home.

Products and services

Search

Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011).

Advertising

In 2025, Google generated 73% of its revenues from advertising. 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. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense, and DoubleClick AdExchange. In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.

Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google Ads allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on advertisements without being interested in the product, causing the advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid. Google Search Console (rebranded from Google Webmaster Tools in May 2015) allows webmasters to check the sitemap, crawl rate, and for security issues of their websites, as well as optimize their website's visibility.

Generative AI

Google had previously used virtual assistants and chatbots, such as Google Bard, prior to the announcement of Gemini in March 2024. An AI training program for Google employees was also introduced in April 2024. Google has created the text-to-image model Imagen, and the text-to-video model Veo. Google integrated AI Overviews into Google Search, and added an AI mode where the search results page is AI-generated. 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. In 2023, Google released NotebookLM, an online tool for synthesizing documents using Gemini. In September 2024, it gained attention for its "Audio Overview" feature, which generates podcast-like summaries of documents. Google also developed LearnLM, a family of language models serving as personal AI tutors.

In June 2026, UK regulators instructed Google to give publishers the ability to choose how their content is used and resurfaced in its AI-generated snippets.

Consumer services

Google offers Gmail for email, Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling, Google Maps and Google Earth for mapping, navigation and satellite imagery, Google Drive for cloud storage of files, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for productivity, Google Photos for photo storage and sharing, Google Keep for note-taking, Google Translate for language translation, YouTube for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for managing public business information, Google Classroom for managing assignments and communication in education, and Duo for social interaction. 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. Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers.

From 2004 to 2019, Google made several attempts at a social network platform. Google+, introduced in 2011, was the largest. Earlier attempts included Orkut, Google Friend Connect, and Google Buzz.

Google develops the Android mobile operating system, as well as its smartwatch, television, car, and Internet of things-enabled smart devices variations. It also develops the Google Chrome web browser, ChromeOS, an operating system based on Chrome, and the AI-powered integrated development environment Google Antigravity.

In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand. It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the "Nexus" branding until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called Pixel. In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, which runs on ChromeOS. In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions. In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets the user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality (VR) media. In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media.

Other hardware products include:

Nest, a series of voice assistant smart speakers that can answer voice queries, play music, find information from apps (calendar, weather etc.), and control third-party smart home appliances (users can tell it to turn on the lights, for example). The Google Nest line includes the original Google Home (later succeeded by the Nest Audio), the Google Home Mini (later succeeded by the Nest Mini), the Google Home Max, the Google Home Hub (later rebranded as the Nest Hub), and the Nest Hub Max.

Enterprise services

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite until October 2020) is a monthly subscription offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a collection of Google's services, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names, and 24/7 support. On September 24, 2012, Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships. There are seven Campus locations: Berlin, London, Madrid, Seoul, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. 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. Among other things, the suite is designed to help "enterprise class marketers" "see the complete customer journey", generate "useful insights", and "deliver engaging experiences to the right people". Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM.

Internet services

In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division. In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal.

Financial services

In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets.

Corporate affairs

Business trends

From the financial year of 2015, figures are published for Alphabet Inc. Until 2014, the key trends of Google were as follows (as at the financial year ending December 31):

Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. GOOG shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares. Since the fourth quarter of 2015, Google's stock has been traded under its holding company, Alphabet Inc., under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.

In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. In January 2013, then-CEO Larry Page commented, "We ended 2012 with a strong quarter ... Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year – not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half." Google's consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2013 was reported in mid-October 2013 as $14.89 billion, a 12 percent increase compared to the previous quarter. Google's Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users' clicks on advertisements. By January 2014, Google's market capitalization had grown to $397 billion.

Tax avoidance strategies

Google uses various tax avoidance strategies. On the list of largest technology companies by revenue, it pays the lowest taxes to the countries of origin of its revenues. Google saved $3.1 billion between 2007 and 2010 in taxes by shuttling non-U.S. profits through Ireland and the Netherlands and then to Bermuda. Such techniques lower its non-U.S. tax rate to 2.3 per cent, while normally the corporate tax rate in, for instance, the UK is 28 per cent. This reportedly sparked a French investigation into Google's transfer pricing practices in 2012.

In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its controversial global tax structure and consolidated all of its intellectual property holdings back to the U.S. Google Vice-president Matt Brittin testified to the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons that his UK sales team made no sales and hence owed no sales taxes to the UK. In January 2016, Google reached a settlement with the UK to pay £130m in back taxes plus higher taxes in future. In 2017, Google channeled $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda to reduce its tax bill.

Corporate identity

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol", which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original paper on PageRank: "We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100[,] and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines." Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil". In October 2015, a related motto was adopted in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase: "Do the right thing". The original motto was retained in the code of conduct of Google, now a subsidiary of Alphabet.

The original Google logo was designed by Sergey Brin. Since 1998, Google has been designing special, temporary alternate logos to place on their homepage intended to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people. The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed "Doodlers".

Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. 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. Google's services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork", Pig Latin, "Hacker" or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine. When searching for the word "anagram", meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form other valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays "Did you mean: nag a ram?" Since 2019, Google runs free online courses to help engineers learn how to plan and author technical documentation better.

Workplace culture

On Fortune magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012, and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index. Google's corporate philosophy includes principles such as "you can make money without doing evil", "you can be serious without a suit", and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun".

As of September 30, 2020, Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. Google's 2020 diversity report states that 32 percent of its workforce are women and 68 percent are men, with the ethnicity of its workforce being predominantly white (51.7%) and Asian (41.9%). Within tech roles, 23.6 percent were women; and 26.7 percent of leadership roles were held by women. In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, as of March 2019.

Google's employees are hired based on a hierarchical system. Employees are split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range "from entry-level data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level six". As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy known as Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of Search Products and User Experience until July 2012, showed that half of all new product launches in the second half of 2005 had originated from the Innovation Time Off.

In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. 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. Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees. In 2013, a class action against several Silicon Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees. In a class action lawsuit filed on January 8, 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against people with actual or perceived "conservative political views", "male gender" or "Caucasian or Asian race".

Office locations

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California is referred to as "the Googleplex", a play on the word googolplex and the headquarters itself being a complex of buildings. Internationally, Google has over 78 offices in more than 50 countries.

In 2006, Google moved into about 300,000 square feet (27,900 m2) of office space at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. The office houses its largest advertising sales team. In 2010, Google bought the building housing the headquarters, in a deal that valued the property at around $1.9 billion. In March 2018, Google's parent company Alphabet bought the nearby Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion. The sale is touted as one of the most expensive real estate transactions for a single building in the history of New York. In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, 1,700,000-square-foot (160,000 m2) headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan's Hudson Square neighborhood. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City.

By late 2006, Google established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs. Other office locations in the U.S. include Atlanta; Austin; Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco; Seattle and Kirkland, Washington; Birmingham, Michigan; Reston, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin.

It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney (birthplace location of Google Maps) and London (part of Android development). In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions at the time of the deal's announcement in January, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017.

In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. The new campus, reported to be the company's largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. 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.

Infrastructure

Google has data centers in North and South America, Asia, and Europe. 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. Traditionally, Google relied on parallel computing on commodity hardware like mainstream x86 computers (similar to home PCs) to keep costs per query low. In 2005, it started developing its own designs, which were only revealed in 2009.

Google has built its own private submarine communications cables. The first cable, named Curie, connects California with Chile and was completed on November 15, 2019. The second fully Google-owned undersea cable, named Dunant, connects the United States with France and is planned to begin operation in 2020. Google's third subsea cable, Equiano, will connect Lisbon (Portugal) with Lagos (Nigeria) and Cape Town (South Africa). 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.

Environment

In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system is the largest rooftop photovoltaic power station constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. Since 2007, Google has aimed for carbon neutrality in regard to its operations. In spring 2009, Google hired a herd of 200 goats for a week from California Grazing to mow their lawn. It was apparently more eco-friendly.

Google disclosed in September 2011 that it "continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes", almost 260 million watts or about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant. 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. Google said that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels in 2010. 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.

In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. 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 July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of power for 20 years.

In December 2016, Google announced that—starting in 2017—it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices. The commitment will make Google "the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy". In November 2017, Google bought 536 megawatts of wind power. The purchase made the firm reach 100% renewable energy. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma. 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. This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said.

Philanthropy

In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion. The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004 and Megan Smith has since replaced him as director.

In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. In 2011, Google donated €1 million to International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International Mathematical Olympiads (2011–2015). In July 2012, Google launched a "Legalize Love" campaign in support of gay rights.

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. After two years of no update, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a website that intends to make all legal documents public and online. Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees. Also in February 2022, Google announced a $100 million fund to expand skills training and job placement for low-income Americans, in conjunction with non-profits Year Up, Social Finance, and Merit America.

Lobbying and political influence

Google ranked second in corporate lobbying expenditures in 2012 and fifth in 2013.

In 2025, Google was one of the donors who funded the White House's East Wing demolition and planned building of a ballroom.

Criticism and controversies

Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy. Other criticisms are alleged misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of other people's intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate Internet privacy, and the energy consumption of its servers, as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, anti-competitive practices, and patent infringement. When Google's parent company Alphabet announced in September 2025 that it would reinstate YouTube creators that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, it was criticized for prioritizing "free expression" over "facts" and placed within the context of the company's shift dating back to 2023.

Political controversies

In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project—Project Vivian—to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions.

On May 1, 2023, Google placed an ad against the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630, an anti-disinformation law that was about to be approved, on its search homepage in Brazil, calling on its users to ask congressional representatives to oppose the legislation. The country's government and judiciary accused the company of undue interference in the congressional debate, saying it could amount to abuse of economic power and ordering the company to change the ad within two hours of notification or face fines of R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per non-compliance hour. The company then promptly removed the ad.

Google has a US$1.2 billion artificial intelligence and surveillance contract with the Israeli military known as Project Nimbus. According to Google employees, the Israeli military could use this technology to expand its surveillance of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Google relocated an outspoken employee overseas, and the employee claimed it was a "retaliation for publicly criticizing the contract". Other Palestinian employees have described an "institutionalised bias" within the company.

In 2021, Google and Amazon engaged in negotiations for a substantial cloud computing agreement valued at $1.2 billion, during which Israel insisted on the inclusion of a confidential code referred to as the "blink mechanism". This stipulation compelled Google and Amazon to essentially disregard legal responsibilities in various nations. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. As per documents disclosed to The Guardian, both Google and Amazon consented to the blink mechanism in order to finalize the profitable agreement.

During 2025, Google engaged in a $45 million, six-month contract with Israel to run advertising campaigns. Some YouTube ads aimed to cast doubt on the existence of a famine in Gaza. Many complaints were filed against Israel's videos, but Google maintained that the ads did not violate its content policies.

Monopoly

Google reaches market domination of the global web search engine market with around 90% market share. The economic moat includes web browser defaults and friction in customer switching. Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari. It marks one of the largest payments between two tech giants in recent years. In April 2019, former Mozilla executive Jonathan Nightingale accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging the Firefox browser over the past decade in order to boost adoption of Google Chrome. In July 2018, Mozilla program manager Chris Peterson accused Google of intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox.

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". On July 18, 2018, the European Commissioner for Competition fined Google €4.34 billion for breaching European Union competition law. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On October 9, 2018, Google confirmed that it had appealed the fine to the General Court of the EU.

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. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by "imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites" that required them to exclude search results from Google's rivals. On September 14, 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion (£3.5 billion) fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google's search and web browser apps. Since the initial accusations, Google has changed its policy.

On July 2, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed Google's appeal, upholding the fine of around €4.1 billion for abusing its dominant position in relation to the Android operating system.

In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019. Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach. On September 10, 2024, Europe's top court imposed a €2.4 billion fine on Google for abusing its dominance in the shopping comparison market, marking the conclusion of a case that began in 2009 with a complaint from British firm Foundem.

Gender discrimination lawsuit

In 2017, three women sued Google, accusing the company of violating California's Equal Pay Act by underpaying its female employees. The lawsuit cited the wage gap was around $17,000 and that Google locked women into lower career tracks, leading to smaller salaries and bonuses. In June 2022, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. As a part of the settlement, Google also agreed to hire a third party to analyze its hiring and compensation practices.

Censorship

According to Ryan Gallagher of The Intercept in August 2018, Google was developing for the People's Republic of China a censored version of its search engine (known as Dragonfly) "that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest". Google was grilled at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company.

Data loss

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. 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.

Data privacy

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 litigation was settled in July 2020 for $7.5 million with a payout to claimants of at least $5 each, with a maximum of $12 each. 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. The judgment claimed Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting data to personalize advertising. Google issued a statement saying it was "deeply committed" to transparency and was "studying the decision" before determining its response. In November 2019, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services began investigation into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the "mass collection of individuals' medical records" complied with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension.

In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. The DeGoogle grassroots campaign continues to grow as privacy activists highlight information about Google products, and the associated incursion on personal privacy rights by the company.

In early June 2020, a $5 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Google by a group of consumers, alleging that Chrome's Incognito browsing mode still collects their user history. The lawsuit became known in March 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case, ruling that they must face the group's charges. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue.

In April 2024, it was announced that Google agreed to settle this lawsuit. Under the terms of the settlement Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately. On January 6, 2022, France's data privacy regulatory body CNIL fined Alphabet's Google 150 million euros (US$169 million) for not allowing its Internet users an easy refusal of cookies along with Facebook.