Google is the most widely used search engine globally.
Google Search began in the late 1990s as a research project by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its early ranking system, known as PageRank, helped distinguish it from many competing search engines by treating links between webpages as signals of importance and authority.
The service grew quickly because it returned useful results from a rapidly expanding World Wide Web. Google later added features such as image and news search, maps, shopping results, instant answers, voice search, and personalized results. Today, “Google” is often used as a verb because searching the web has become one of the company’s most familiar services.
Yahoo and Bing remain recognizable competitors, while DuckDuckGo emphasizes privacy and reduced tracking. None has matched Google’s worldwide search usage. A common mix-up is confusing the search engine with Google’s broader company or with a web browser such as Chrome: Google Search is the search service, while Chrome is software used to access websites and search engines.