Google | Company Profile

Plenty of companies have seen their product’s name become a vernacular noun, but Google (and its services) has become a verb: i.e., “I googled it.” There may be other search engines and browsers, but Google has an enormous chunk of market share, holding 85 to 92 percent, utterly dominating the market. If there is a company that everyone uses, this is it.

Started as a Stanford University graduate student project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the mid-1990s, its original name, “BackRub” (which the company now acknowledges was not a good choice), was changed to Google, a variation on “googol”—the number one followed by 100 zeroes—representing the number of choices the search engine would be giving you. Google Inc. officially launched in 1998, and expanded quickly after that, creating and releasing Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004,…