What is Google?
Google is the world’s most-used search engine, handling billions of searches every day. It is the flagship product of Google LLC, an Alphabet Inc. subsidiary that also makes Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, and Android. Google earns most of its revenue from advertising on search results, YouTube, and partner sites.
More About Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford. In 2015, Google reorganized under a new holding company, Alphabet Inc., and it remains Alphabet’s largest business today. Google holds about 91% of the global search engine market, according to StatCounter (June 2026), and handles more than 5 trillion searches a year by its own count.
How does Google Search work?
Google Search works in three stages: crawling, indexing, and serving ranked results.
- Crawling. Automated programs called crawlers follow links across the web to discover pages.
- Indexing. Google analyzes each page and stores it in a giant database called the index.
- Ranking and serving. When someone searches, Google’s algorithms sort the indexed pages and serve the most relevant results, along with ads and AI-generated answer summaries (Google’s AI Overviews).
Google updates these algorithms constantly, and larger algorithm updates can noticeably reshuffle rankings.
What products does Google offer?
Search is the front door, but Google makes far more: Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, the Android operating system, Google Drive and Workspace, and Google Cloud for businesses. Most are free to use; advertising pays the bills.
Why does Google matter for your website?
For most websites, no single channel sends more visitors than Google search, which is why search engine optimization (SEO) is largely about meeting Google’s standards. Google’s guidance rewards fast, secure sites with helpful, original content. Free tools like Google Search Console show you how your site appears in results and what people searched to find it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns Google?
Alphabet Inc. owns Google — Google LLC is its largest subsidiary. Alphabet trades publicly as GOOGL and GOOG, and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin still hold enough special shares to control the company.
What does the name Google mean?
The name Google comes from “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros — a nod to organizing a nearly limitless amount of information. The misspelling started as a domain-name typo, and the founders kept it.
Is Google a search engine or a web browser?
Google is a search engine, the site where you type a query and get results. Chrome is Google’s web browser, the app you use to visit websites. Chrome comes with Google as its default search engine in most of the world, which is why the two blur together.
How does Google make money?
Google makes most of its money from advertising: businesses pay for sponsored results on search pages, ads on YouTube, and ads on partner sites. Advertising was about 73% of Alphabet’s revenue in 2025; the rest comes from cloud services, app-store fees, subscriptions, and hardware.
