Google facts for kids
The Google logo used since 2015
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Google's headquarters, the Googleplex
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Google Inc. (1998–2017) | ||
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Traded as | NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG | ||
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Founded | September 4, 1998Menlo Park, California, United States | in||
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Headquarters | Googleplex,
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Parent | Alphabet Inc. | ||
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Google LLC (i/ˈɡuːɡəl/, GOO-ghəl) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and is one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.
Contents
History
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company; Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.
Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds. Google received money from two other angel investors in 1998: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.
Between these initial investors, friends, and family Google raised around $1,000,000, which is what allowed them to open up their original shop in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.
On August 19, 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public offering. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
On November 13, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.
In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time.
In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies, mainly Apple and Microsoft, and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.
2012 onwards
In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million. While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service. Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official public statement, Page explained that the "health and well-being" company would focus on "the challenge of ageing and associated diseases".
On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held artificial intelligence company from London. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the price. The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in the artificial intelligence and robotics community. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at the game of Go.
According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple Inc.) in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion.
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became CEO of Alphabet.
On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company that argued bias and "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions. 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.
On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia.
On June 3, 2019, the United States Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google for antitrust violations. 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.
In December 2019, former PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready became Google's new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved with Google Pay.
In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. 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. Most employees were also working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home
The 2020 Google services outages disrupted Google services: one in August that affected Google Drive among others, another in November affecting YouTube, and a third in December affecting the entire suite of Google applications. All three outages were resolved within hours.
In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees.
In January 2021, the Australian Government proposed legislation that would require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their content. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia.
In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for Ubisoft ports on Google Stadia. Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such as Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia.
In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called "Project Bernanke" that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December.
In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.
In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search queries. It would not remove content that is "broadly useful", such as news articles, or already part of the public record.
In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up Raxium. Raxium is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the development of micro-optics, monolithic integration, and system integration.
In early 2023, 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 early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company's tools, including AI technology. The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google's total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion.
Products and services
Search engine
Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators. According to comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. 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.
Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. Google also hosts Google Books, a service which searches the text found in books in its database and shows limited previews or and the full book where allowed.
Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011).
Advertising
Google generates most of its revenues from advertising. 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. Forty-six percent of this profit was from clicks (cost per clicks), amounting to US$109,652 million in 2017. This includes three principal methods, namely AdMob, AdSense (such as AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, etc.) and DoubleClick AdExchange. 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 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.
Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google Ads allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on advertisements without being interested in the product, causing the advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid. Google Search Console (rebranded from Google Webmaster Tools in May 2015) allows webmasters to check the sitemap, crawl rate, and for security issues of their websites, as well as optimize their website's visibility.
Artificial intelligence
Google had previously utilized virtual assistants and chatbots, such as Google Bard, prior to the announcement of Gemini in March 2024. None of them, however, had been seen as legitimate competitors to ChatGPT, unlike Gemini. An artificial intelligence training program for Google employees was also introduced in April 2024.
Consumer services
Web-based services
Google offers Gmail for email, Google Calendar for time-management and scheduling, Google Maps for mapping, navigation and satellite imagery, Google Drive for cloud storage of files, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for productivity, Google Photos for photo storage and sharing, Google Keep for note-taking, Google Translate for language translation, YouTube for video viewing and sharing, Google My Business for managing public business information, and Duo for social interaction. In March 2019, Google unveiled a cloud gaming service named Stadia. 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. Some Google services are not web-based. 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.
Software
Google develops the Android mobile operating system, as well as its smartwatch, television, car, and Internet of things-enabled smart devices variations. It also develops the Google Chrome web browser, and ChromeOS, an operating system based on Chrome.
Hardware
In January 2010, Google released Nexus One, the first Android phone under its own brand. It spawned a number of phones and tablets under the "Nexus" branding until its eventual discontinuation in 2016, replaced by a new brand called Pixel.
In 2011, the Chromebook was introduced, which runs on ChromeOS.
In July 2013, Google introduced the Chromecast dongle, which allows users to stream content from their smartphones to televisions.
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.
Other hardware products include:
- Nest, a series of voice assistant smart speakers that can answer voice queries, play music, find information from apps (calendar, weather etc.), and control third-party smart home appliances (users can tell it to turn on the lights, for example). The Google Nest line includes the original Google Home (later succeeded by the Nest Audio), the Google Home Mini (later succeeded by the Nest Mini), the Google Home Max, the Google Home Hub (later rebranded as the Nest Hub), and the Nest Hub Max.
- Nest Wifi (originally Google Wifi), a connected set of Wi-Fi routers to simplify and extend coverage of home Wi-Fi.
Enterprise services
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite until October 2020) is a monthly subscription offering for organizations and businesses to get access to a collection of Google's services, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides, with additional administrative tools, unique domain names, and 24/7 support.
On September 24, 2012, Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships. Presently, there are seven Campus locations: Berlin, London, Madrid, Seoul, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw.
On March 15, 2016, Google announced the introduction of Google Analytics 360 Suite, "a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers" which can be integrated with BigQuery on the Google Cloud Platform. 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". Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM.
Internet services
In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. Following Google's corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet's Access division.
In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal.
Financial services
In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets.
Corporate identity
The original Google logo was designed by Sergey Brin. As of 1998[update] Google has been designing special, temporary alternate logos to place on their homepage intended to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people.
Google Doodle
The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed "Doodlers".
Workplace culture
On Fortune magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012, and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world's most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index. Google's corporate philosophy includes principles such as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."
As of September 30, 2020[update] Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. Google's 2020[update] diversity report states that 32 percent of its workforce are women and 68 percent are men, with the ethnicity of its workforce being predominantly white (51.7%) and Asian (41.9%). Within tech roles, 23.6 percent were women; and 26.7 percent of leadership roles were held by women. In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, as of March 2019[update]
Google's employees are hired based on a hierarchical system. Employees are split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range "from entry-level data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level six." As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy known as Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president of Search Products and User Experience until July 2012, showed that half of all new product launches in the second half of 2005 had originated from the Innovation Time Off.
In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer whose purpose was to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on. Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees. In 2013, a class action against several Silicon Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees. In a lawsuit filed January 8, 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against a class defined by their "conservative political views[,] male gender[,] and/or [...] Caucasian or Asian race".
On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced. The coalition is made up of "13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, [the] United Kingdom, and Switzerland." The group is affiliated with the UNI Global Union, which represents nearly 20 million international workers from various unions and federations. The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture. Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. In 2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian.
Office locations
Google's Global Offices sum a total of 85 Locations worldwide, with 32 offices in North America, 3 of them in Canada and 29 in United States Territory, California being the state with the most Google's offices with 9 in total including the Googleplex. In the Latin America Region Google counts with 6 offices, in Europe 24 (3 of them in UK), the Asia Pacific region counts with 18 offices principally 4 in India and 3 in China, and the Africa Middle East region counts 5 offices.
North America
SN | City | Country or US State |
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1. | Ann Arbor | Michigan |
2. | Atlanta | Georgia |
3. | Austin | Texas |
4. | Boulder | Colorado |
5. | Boulder – Pearl Place | Colorado |
6. | Boulder – Walnut | Colorado |
7. | Cambridge | Massachusetts |
8. | Chapel Hill | North Carolina |
9. | Chicago – Carpenter | Illinois |
10. | Chicago – Fulton Market | Illinois |
11. | Detroit | Michigan |
12. | Irvine | California |
13. | Kirkland | Washington |
14. | Kitchener | Canada |
15. | Los Angeles | California |
16. | Madison | Wisconsin |
17. | Miami | Florida |
18. | Montreal | Canada |
19. | Mountain View | California |
20. | New York | New York |
21. | Pittsburgh | Pennsylvania |
22. | Playa Vista | California |
23. | Portland | Oregon |
24. | Redwood City | California |
25. | Reston | Virginia |
26. | San Bruno | California |
27. | San Diego | California |
28. | San Francisco – HQ | California |
29. | Seattle | Washington |
30. | Sunnyvale | California |
31. | Toronto | Canada |
32. | Washington DC | District of Columbia |
Latin America
SN | City | Country |
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1. | Belo Horizonte | Brazil |
2. | Bogotá | Colombia |
3. | Buenos Aires | Argentina |
4. | Mexico City | Mexico |
5. | Santiago | Chile |
6. | São Paulo | Brazil |
Europe
SN | City | Country |
---|---|---|
1. | Aarhus | Denmark |
2. | Amsterdam | Netherlands |
3. | Athens | Greece |
4. | Berlin | Germany |
5. | Brussels | Belgium |
6. | Copenhagen | Denmark |
7. | Dublin | Ireland |
8. | Hamburg | Germany |
9. | Lisbon | Portugal |
10. | London – 6PS | United Kingdom |
11. | London – BEL | United Kingdom |
12. | London – CSG | United Kingdom |
13. | Madrid | Spain |
14. | Milan | Italy |
15. | Moscow | Russia |
16. | Munich | Germany |
17. | Oslo | Norway |
18. | Paris | France |
19. | Prague | Czech Republic |
20. | Stockholm | Sweden |
21. | Vienna | Austria |
22. | Warsaw | Poland |
23. | Wrocław | Poland |
24. | Zürich – BRA | Switzerland |
25. | Zürich – EUR | Switzerland |
Asia–Pacific
SN | City | Country |
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1. | Auckland | New Zealand |
2. | Bangalore | India |
3. | Bangkok | Thailand |
4. | Beijing | China |
5. | Guangzhou | China |
6. | Gurgaon | India |
7. | Hong Kong | Hong Kong |
8. | Hyderabad | India |
9. | Jakarta | Indonesia |
10. | Kuala Lumpur | Malaysia |
11. | Manila | Philippines |
12. | Melbourne | Australia |
13. | Mumbai | India |
14. | Seoul | South Korea |
15. | Shanghai | China |
16. | Singapore | Singapore |
17. | Sydney | Australia |
18. | Taipei | Taiwan |
19. | Tokyo – RPG | Japan |
20. | Tokyo – STRM | Japan |
Africa and the Middle East
SN | City | Country |
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1. | Dubai | United Arab Emirates |
2. | Haifa | Israel |
3. | Istanbul | Turkey |
4. | Johannesburg | South Africa |
5. | Tel Aviv | Israel |
Interesting facts about Google
- Google and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide.
- Google is also the largest search engine, mapping and navigation application, email provider, office suite, online video platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system, web browser, machine learning framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the world as measured by market share.
- On the list of most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by Forbes and fourth by Interbrand.
- Google was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, the name was changed to Google - a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written 10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
- Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
- Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet.
- Google's services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, "Hacker" or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine.
- When searching for the word "anagram," meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form other valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays "Did you mean: nag a ram?" Since 2019, Google runs free online courses to help engineers learn how to plan and author technical documentation better.
- Google has data centers in North and South America, Asia, and Europe.
- Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California is referred to as "the Googleplex", a play on words on the number googolplex and the headquarters itself being a complex of buildings. Internationally, Google has over 78 offices in more than 50 countries.
Philanthropy
In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion. The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004 and Megan Smith has since[update] replaced him as director.
In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. In 2011, Google donated 1 million euros to International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International Mathematical Olympiads (2011–2015). In July 2012, Google launched a "Legalize Love" campaign in support of gay rights.
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. After two years of no update, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a website that intends to make all legal documents public and online.
Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees.
Also in February 2022, Google announced a $100 million fund to expand skills training and job placement for low-income Americans, in conjunction with non-profits Year Up, Social Finance, and Merit America.
See also
In Spanish: Google para niños
- Outline of Google
- History of Google
- Criticism of Google
- List of Google products
- Google China
- Google logo
- Googlization
- Google.org
- Google ATAP
- List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet
- Surveillance Capitalism