Early Google Employees in 1999

Early Google Employees in 1999

Google is a United States-headquartered, multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.

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 control 56 of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated 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 useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil." In 2004, Google moved to its new 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 productivity software including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive), an office suite (Google Docs) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS for a netbook known as a Chromebook. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its "high-quality low-cost" Nexus devices and acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012. In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.


Inside a Google data center

The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007); and to process over one billion search requests, and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data, each day (as of 2009). 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. Its market dominance has led to prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues such as search neutrality, copyright, censorship, and privacy.

谷歌公司，是一家美国的跨国科技企业，业务范围涵盖互联网搜索、云计算、广告技术等领域，开发并提供大量基于互联网的产品与服务，其主要利润来自于AdWords等广告服务。谷歌由当时在斯坦福大学攻读理工博士的拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林共同创建，因此两人也被称为“Google Guys”。1998年9月4日，谷歌以私营公司的形式创立，设计并管理一个互联网搜索引擎“谷歌搜索”；谷歌网站则於1999年下半年启用。2004年8月19日，Google公司的股票在纳斯达克上市，后来被称为“三驾马车”的公司两位共同创始人与出任首席执行官的埃里克·施密特在当时承诺：共同在谷歌工作至少二十年，即至2024年止。创始之初，谷歌官方的公司使命为“整合全球范围的信息，使人人皆可访问并从中受益”（To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful）；而非正式的口号则为“不作恶”（Don't be evil），由工程师阿米特·帕特尔（Amit Patel）所创，并得到了保罗·布赫海特的支持。谷歌公司的总部称为“Googleplex”，位于美国加州圣克拉拉县的山景城。2011年4月，佩奇接替施密特擔任首席执行官。

据估计，谷歌在全世界的数据中心内运营着超过百万台的服务器，每天处理数以亿计的搜索请求和约二十四PB用户生成的数据。谷歌自创立起开始的快速成长同时也带动了一系列的产品研发、并购事项与合作关系，而不仅仅是公司核心的网络搜索业务。谷歌公司提供丰富的线上软件服务，如雲端硬碟、Gmail电子邮件，包括Orkut、Google Buzz以及Google+在内的社交网络服务。谷歌的产品同时也以应用软件的形式进入用户桌面，例如Google Chrome网页浏览器、Picasa图片整理与编辑软件、Google Talk即时通讯工具等。另外，谷歌还进行了移动设备的Android操作系统以及上网本的Google Chrome OS操作系统的开发。

网站资讯分析网Alexa数据显示，谷歌的主域名google.com为全世界访问量最高的站点，除此之外，Google搜索在其他国家或地区域名下的多个站点（google.co.in、google.de、google.com.hk等等），及旗下的YouTube、Blogger、Orkut等的访问量都在前一百名之内。其中，社交网络服务Orkut已于2014年9月被关闭。

Source: Wikipedia