Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
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 individual webpages. Since Google was founded in 1998, it has grown to serve millions of people around the world.
In 2000, Google introduced AdWords, a self-service program for creating online ad campaigns. Today these advertising solutions, which include display, mobile and video ads as well as the simple text ads they introduced more than a decade ago, help thousands of businesses grow and be successful.
On April Fools’ Day in 2004, Gmail was launched. Google launched Google Maps and Google Earth in 2005. Today Maps also features live traffic, transit directions and street-level imagery, and Earth lets you explore the ocean and the moon. In 2006, they acquired online video sharing site YouTube. Android—an open platform for mobile devices—and the Open Handset Alliance was launched in 2007.Google Chrome was launched in September 2008.
In June 2011,they introduced the Google+ project, aimed at bringing the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web, and making all of Google better by including people, their relationships and their interests.