Google owns the Android operating system and was founded in 1998 as a search-engine business.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in September 1998 while they were students at Stanford University. Their earlier research project, BackRub, explored how links between webpages could help rank search results. Google’s name is derived from “googol,” the mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100.
Google acquired Android Inc. in 2005. Android became a major mobile operating system used by manufacturers around the world. Google also expanded into advertising, maps, video, cloud computing, hardware, and artificial intelligence.
Alphabet became Google’s parent company in 2015 through a corporate restructuring. This distinction matters for market-cap questions: Alphabet is the publicly traded parent, while Google is its most prominent operating company. The existing ticker-related question about Alphabet is different from this question about Google’s founding and Android ownership.