The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In 2017, three women sued Google, accusing the company of violating California’s Equal Pay Act by underpaying its female employees. The DoJ also sought a ban on Google re-entering the browser market for five years and restrictions on its investments in rival search or AI technologies. On October 8, 2024, The U.S. government suggested it could request Google to divest parts of its business, such as the Chrome browser and Android, due to its alleged monopoly in online search.
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In September 2024, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices in the online advertising technology market, potentially harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history. In May 2017, Google enabled a new “Personal” tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts’ various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos.
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This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets. The judgment claimed Google had failed to sufficiently inform users of its methods for collecting data to personalize advertising. It was ruled in 2025 by the Justice Department alongside 17 other states that Google operates a monopoly in online advertising technology. In August 2024, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held a monopoly in online search and text advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. On March 20, 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion) fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to “compete and innovate fairly” in the online advertising market.
The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, 1,700,000-square-foot (160,000 m2) headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan’s Hudson Square neighborhood. In March 2018, Google’s parent company Alphabet bought the nearby Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion. In 2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian to “convince them (employees) that unions suck”. Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union.
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The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google’s total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia. Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020, except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and pace of investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel. On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment complaints.
The company subsequently announced that “48 employees have been fired over the last two years” for sexual misconduct. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo! PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon.
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In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption. This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region’s specific needs and training local talent.
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Explore this year’s top-trending searches from around the world. Set how you sign in to Google apps and services. The company faced accusations of profiting from the conflict, particularly given that hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly died from hunger and malnutrition according to Gaza’s health ministry. The campaigns reportedly aim to counter international criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, including denying the existence of famine despite UN declarations and promoting content that discredits aid agencies like UNRWA. During 2025, Google engaged in a $45 million, six-month contract with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office to run advertising campaigns that the contract describes as “hasbara” (propaganda). Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters.
The new campus, reported to be the company’s largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City.
In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. On September 14, 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion (£3.5 billion) fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google’s search and web browser apps. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by “imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites” that required them to exclude search results from Google’s rivals. Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy.
- In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results.
- Google, which intended to appeal, argued that the proposals were too extreme, while also dealing with other antitrust cases involving its app store and advertising operations.
- Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach.
- The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed.
- The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones.
In 2020, the FBI used a geofence warrant to request data from Google about Android devices near the Seattle Police Officers Guild building following an arson attempt during Black Lives Matter protests. In August 2024, Google sent an email to users informing them of its legal obligation to disclose certain confidential information to U.S. government authorities. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Google was grilled at a Senate pin up casino india Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on the project one month later.
Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on October 20, 2020, asserting that it has illegally maintained its monopoly position in web search and search advertising. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google’s constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for “promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results”.
Google Earth, launched in 2005, allows users to see high-definition satellite pictures from all over the world for free through a client software downloaded to their computers. A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites. In 2023, Google released NotebookLM, an online tool for synthesizing documents using Gemini.
- The new campus, reported to be the company’s largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees.
- On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to “non-public” Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users.
- Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019.
- It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney (birthplace location of Google Maps) and London (part of Android development).
Among other things, the suite is designed to help “enterprise class marketers” “see the complete customer journey”, generate “useful insights”, and “deliver engaging experiences to the right people”. In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media. In June 2014, Google announced Google Cardboard, a simple cardboard viewer that lets the user place their smartphone in a special front compartment to view virtual reality (VR) media. In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions.
Google’s Internet business was responsible for $10.8 billion of this total, with an increase in the number of users’ clicks on advertisements. Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google’s holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.update The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.
Google’s other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind). After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as “Google”), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s internet properties and interests.