Google is a US multinational technology company, considered one of the big five alongside the FAANGS (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google). It specialises in Internet-related services and products including online advertising, search engine, cloud computing, software and hardware. Google.com is the most visited website in the world while several other services it owns figure in the top 100, including YouTube.

The company was founded by Stanford Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. It began as a research project designed to revolutionise web ranking, looking not just at how many times a search term appeared on a page but how a system could be built to system to analyse the relationship among websites, determining relevance by number of pages and importance of pages linked to the original site.

The famous founding pair still own 14% of the internet behemoth by stock market value and control 56% of its shares by way of special shares classified super-voting stock. The company first sold shares to the public in August 2004, raising $1.67B for a market value of £23B. A decade later and the shares had increased by a multiple of 20x, before the company reorganised itself into a conglomerate of business interests under the umbrella “Alphabet”.

Rapid growth has come thanks to multiple products beyond its initial eponymous search engine. Think Smartphones and Tablets, (Pixel, Nexus), smart speaker (Home), social network (Google+), Email (Gmail), Maps, Traffic (Waze), Video (YouTube), Photos, Web Browser (Chrome). The company leads the way in the development of mobile operating system known as Android as well as its own Chrome web browser and operating system for its own Chrome laptops.

Google shares, now known as Alphabet, are listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the ticker GOOG (Class C shares) and GOOGL (Class A shares). The former have no voting rights while the latter do. The owners hold the Class B shares which benefit from 10-1 super voting rights ensuring they maintain control of the company.