In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia. The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo! PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States. The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. Requires internet connection. Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters.

Europe

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. 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. 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. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division. 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". 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.

U.S. government contracts

Google was grilled at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later. In June 2022, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. 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. The investigation claimed Google used its market power to prevent rivals from competing fairly, affecting billions spent on digital ads. Google, which intended to appeal, argued that the proposals were too extreme, while also dealing with other antitrust cases involving its app store and advertising operations. 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. It also stated that it is committed to operating its data centers and offices using only carbon-free energy by 2030. In September 2020, Google announced it had retroactively offset all of its carbon emissions since the company's foundation in 1998. This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said.

• Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division.
• Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies.
• Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens.
• One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon.
• The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.
• 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.

Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020, except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the uspin casino registration focus and pace of investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel. 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. On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London. Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. 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. 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. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees. Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. 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.

Enterprise services

One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025. The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma.

Products and services

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 addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history. The lawsuit claims Google collected data from users who had specifically opted out of tracking.

• 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.
• It was ruled in 2025 by the Justice Department alongside 17 other states that Google operates a monopoly in online advertising technology.
• 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.
• 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 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.

Corporate identity

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. 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. Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. Other Palestinian employees have described an "institutionalised bias" within the company. According to Google employees, the Israeli military could use this technology to expand its surveillance of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. 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. 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 In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. 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. Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to "cooperate and assist one another" in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices. 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. 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. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019.