Google Inc. is an American public corporation (public company), earning revenue from advertising (AdWords) related to its Internet search (Google search), e-mail (Gmail), online mapping (Google Maps), office productivity (Google Apps), social networking (Orkut), and video sharing (YouTube) services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies (Google Search Appliance). Google has also developed an open source web browser (Google Chrome) and a mobile operating system (Android (operating system)). The Google headquarters, the Googleplex (Googleplex), is located in Mountain View, California. As of20090331df=US, the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is running thousands of servers worldwide, which process millions of search requests each day and about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising $ (United States dollar)1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of $23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions (List of Google acquisitions), and partnerships (Google#Partnerships). Environmentalism (Google#Environmentalism), philanthropy (Google.org) and positive employee relations (Google#Corporate affairs and culture) have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazines #1 Best Place to Work,"100 Best Companies to Work For 2007". Fortune Magazine (link published by CNN). 22 January 2007. Retrieved on January 8, 2007. and as the most powerful brand in the world. Alexa (Alexa Internet) ranks Google as the most visited website on the Internet.

Googles mission is "to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful". The unofficial company slogan, coined by former employee and Gmails first engineer Paul Buchheit, is "Dont be evil". Criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship (censorship by Google).