Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024.
- Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings.
- 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.
- 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.
- Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators.
- 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.
- Following Google’s corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet’s Access division.
U.S. government contracts
- Google reportedly said “the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service.” In July 2025, the U.S.
- Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market.
- In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks.
- The investigation claimed Google used its market power to prevent rivals from competing fairly, affecting billions spent on digital ads.
- In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle.
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. In 2008, Google announced its "project 10100", which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites. In December 2016, Google announced that—starting in 2017—it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs.
TikTok – Videos, Shop & LIVE
This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.
Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites. The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway. 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.
Office locations
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 November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced.
How 'YouTube in Session' connects creators and policymakers in Washington, D.C.
This will grow their green energy profile by 40%, giving them an extra 1.6 gigawatt of clean energy, the company said. In September 2019, Google's chief executive announced plans for a $2 billion wind and solar investment, the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history. In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The new campus, reported to be the company's largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees.
YouTube TV
The lawsuit claims Google collected data from users who had specifically opted out of tracking. Under the terms of the settlement Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. 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.
The EU Court of Justice found that Google's treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as "discriminatory", was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine. Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a "code red" and a "directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months". In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner, a Go tool for finding security holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks.
Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. Héctor García-Molina and Jeffrey Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind).
On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine spinmaya casino of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for "promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results". Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari. In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. Other Palestinian employees have described an "institutionalised bias" within the company.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently.