Google

The web’s dominant search engine with a total U.S. search market share of 67.0% as of August 2013 according to comScore. Google was begun by Sanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 and incorporated in 1998.

The key concept behind Google is PageRank which determines a page’s relevance for a search term by the number of links to the page and the importance of the pages the links appear on.

In addition to providing search results Google also offers a number of other products including:

• Adsense (acquired Applied Semantics – formerly Oingo – in 2003)
• Adwords (launched 2000 and acquired DoubleClick in 2007)
• Android operating system (acquired Android, Inc. in 2005)
• Blogger (acquired Pyra Labs in 2003)
• Chrome browser (launched 2008)
• Docs – now included in Google Drive (incorporates a variety of products developed in-house and through acquisition)
• Drive (launched 2012)
• Earth (acquired Keyhole, Inc. in 2004)
• Gmail (launched by invitation only in 2004 and open to general public in 2007)
• Maps (acquired Where 2 Technologies in 2004)
• Plus (launched 2011)
• YouTube (acquired in 2006)