Episode 3038
Google
Wed, 2025-Aug-27 01:55 UTC
Length - 4:44
Direct Link
Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.
With 1,467,444 views on Tuesday, 26 August 2025 our article of the day is Google.
Google LLC ( , GOO-gəl) 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" by the BBC and is one of the world's most valuable brands. 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. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.
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. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email (Gmail), navigation and mapping (Waze, Maps, and Earth), cloud computing (Cloud), web navigation (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android and ChromeOS), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photos), videotelephony (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Pixel Watch and Fitbit), music streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand (YouTube TV), AI (Google Assistant and Gemini), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI chips (TPU), and more. Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. Discontinued Google products include gaming (Stadia), Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail. Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Sycamore), self-driving cars (Waymo), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs), and transformer models (Google DeepMind).
Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide, followed by Facebook and Twitter (now known as X). 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 as of January 2022 and fourth by Interbrand as of February 2022. The company has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:55 UTC on Wednesday, 27 August 2025.
For the full current version of the article, see Google on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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Until next time, I'm neural Niamh.
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