Google began in 1998 as a Stanford research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their insight — captured in the PageRank algorithm — was that a web page's importance could be judged by how many other pages linked to it. That produced search results so much better than the competition that "to google" became a verb.
The advertising engine
Google's second, quieter breakthrough was the business model. AdWords (now Google Ads) matched small text adverts to search queries and auctioned them automatically. It turned attention into a vast, high-margin revenue stream — the money that funds Search, Maps, Gmail, Android and much of what people use for free.
Beyond search
Through acquisitions and heavy research spending, Google expanded far beyond its origins: Android put it at the centre of mobile; Chrome became the dominant browser; Google Cloud competes for enterprise workloads; and YouTube is one of the world's largest media platforms.
An AI company
Google has long been a leader in artificial intelligence — through DeepMind, the TensorFlow framework, and, most consequentially, the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, whose Transformer architecture underpins nearly every large language model today. Reorganised in 2015 under the holding company Alphabet, Google now frames itself as an "AI-first" company, racing to weave generative AI back into the search and products it is best known for.