Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009, the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour. ^[5]

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while students at Stanford University. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering was on August 19, 2004. It raised $1.67 billion, implying a total value of $23 billion. Google's rapid growth has sparked a sequence of new products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond its core search engine. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations were from the start assigned an important role in establishing brand image. Google has been repeatedly named Fortune Magazine's Number One Best Place to Work ^[6] and most powerful brand in the world. ^[7] Alexa lists Google as the Internet's most visited website. ^[8]

The company's stated mission from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." ^[9] Its unofficial slogan, coined by Gmail's first engineer, Paul Buchheit, was Don't be evil. ^{[10] [11] [12]} Google has been criticized over issues of privacy of personal information, copyright and alleged censorship.

Contents:
1. Etymology
2. History
3. Products and services
4. Platform
5. Corporate affairs and culture
6. See also
7. References
8. Further reading
9. External links

Google Inc.

Type	Public NASDAQ: GOOG LSE: GGEA
Founded	Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998) [1]
Founder(s)	Sergey M. Brin Lawrence E. Page
Headquarters	Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Eric E. Schmidt (Chairman) & (CEO) Sergey M. Brin (Technology President) Lawrence E. Page (Products President)
Industry	Internet, Computer software
Products	See list of Google products Help Google Web Search Features Google Services & Tools Google Labs [2]
Revenue	▲31.3% $ 21.796 billion (2008) [3]
Operating income	▲30.4% $ 6.632 billion (2008) [3]
Net income	▲.6% $ 4.227 billion (2008) [3]
Total assets	▲ $ 31.768 billion (2008) [3]
Total equity	▲ $ 28.239 billion (2008) [3]
Employees	19,665 - September 30, 2009 [4]
Website	Google.com