Alphabet, a market-cap giant, was created in 2015 when Google Inc. reorganized under a new parent company.
The restructuring made Alphabet Inc. the holding company for Google and several other businesses. Google remained the largest operating company, with products such as Search, YouTube, Android, and Google Cloud.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 while they were Stanford University students. Alphabet was designed to give different businesses greater independence while allowing the founders and executives to oversee a broader collection of projects.
A frequent confusion is calling Alphabet simply Google in a corporate-ownership question. Google is the operating subsidiary and consumer brand; Alphabet is the public parent company whose shares are traded on stock markets. Market-cap rankings usually identify the listed parent, not each internal division.