Google operates the world’s largest online search engine and was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Page and Brin began developing Google at Stanford University in the 1990s. Their early search technology ranked pages partly by analyzing links between them, an approach associated with the PageRank algorithm. Google was incorporated in 1998.
Search advertising became the company’s central commercial engine. Google later added products including Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, and YouTube, while its parent company Alphabet separated Google from several other ventures in 2015.
The phrase “largest search engine” refers to usage and global reach, not necessarily market capitalization. Google itself is not the publicly traded parent-company name: Alphabet’s Class A and Class C shares represent the listed corporation. This makes Google and Alphabet related but not interchangeable answers in company-market questions.