Google is the most widely used web search engine in the world and has approximately eight billion pages. Google is an automated system that allows the user to insert a word or phrase into a search box that returns results in order of relevance based on statistical analysis of data. Designed at Stanford on September 15, 1997, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a company based in Mountain View, California, that offers many products to individuals and companies. Among them are the web browser Chrome, the Android OS, the Google Plus social network, and Google Analytics traffic analysis. In the English language, Google has become a transitive verb, to google, means "to do a search on the web". Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in 1995. Both were doctoral students at Stanford. Larry was the son of a computer science professor and Sergey was keen on astronomy and mathematics. The first search engine designed by Page and Brin, BackRub, was renamed "Googol", a term that represents a huge amount of data: numerically it is a ONE followed by ONE HUNDRED zeros.

In 1998, the company became known as Google. The new search engine more than rivaled Yahoo! and Ask.com. Google launched AdWords in 2000, a service that included advertisement links within pages that would become the company’s main source of income. In 2004, Gmail, the e-mail site created to compete with Microsoft's Hotmail, was introduced. A year later, Google Maps and Google Earth, satellite map services with geolocation, were created. In 2006, the company acquired the video site, YouTube. In 2013, it began experimenting with Google Glass: glasses with integrated, augmented reality. Google has been listed since August of 2004 on the Nasdaq stock index in New York. In 2013, Google recorded sales exceeding 57 billion dollars and is used for an average of 6 million daily searches. Today Google has more than 30,000 employees and is present in over 40 countries worldwide with approximately 70 registered addresses. To commemorate and celebrate characters and events, Google periodically change the graphics of its logo. These temporary logos are called “Doodles”.