Company Profile
Company name
Business sector
Technology
Who is Google?
Google's mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
What Google does
Google is the most used search engine in the world. It helps people find information, whether on web pages, maps, videos, books, or in many other formats.
How Google started
Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't like each other much when they first met at university! But they shared a mutual interest in improving web search, and as their PhD project they started building a search engine that would organise the content on the internet and make information easier to find.
Working to perfect their technology, they built their own computer partly out of Lego in Larry's university room. They had planned to call the company Googol (1 followed by 100 zeros). However when their first investor wrote them out a cheque to Google Inc they quickly had to set up the company with that name.
Google logo
How Google has grown
Google timeline.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are still heavily involved in the day-to-day running of Google and it is their entrepreneurial ethos that sets the tone for the whole company.
Since 1995, through innovation and acquisition, the business has grown to its current size of 12,000 people with a 2006 turnover of over $10bn.
Millions of people across the world use Google every day. It is the most visited website in the UK and in the world*. (* Comscore Media Matrix, Niesen/NetRatings, May 2007).
Google in the next decade
Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This means all information – not just on the internet or traditional forms of information such as books or maps. This currently includes user-generated content such as videos, blogs, email, documents, wikis and more.
As new types of information develop, Google will help users find, organise and share these. Therefore Google must stay at the cutting edge of technology in order to maintain its popularity with users.