Google

The search, video, mobile and AI company behind Google Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome and the Gemini models. Its mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

About Google

Google is a technology company best known for Google Search, and for products used by billions of people including YouTube, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Maps and Google Cloud. It is also a leading AI company: it builds the Gemini models, and its DeepMind lab has produced landmark AI systems such as AlphaGo.

Google began as a research project at Stanford University. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met there in 1995 and built a search engine that ranked pages by the links between them, first called Backrub and later renamed Google. The company was set up in 1998 after its first outside investment, and was first run from a garage in Menlo Park, California. In 2015 it became part of a new parent company, Alphabet, with Sundar Pichai as Google's chief executive. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California, known as the Googleplex.

Google's mission has long been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". That idea shows up in everything from search results to translation, maps and AI tools that help people find, understand and create things. Google bought DeepMind in 2014, and the two now work together on the Gemini family of AI models.

Google has several London offices, and London is part of its Android development, according to public records we checked. Our sources do not give staff numbers or the exact current location of each office, so we have left those out.

For young people, Google shows how wide a technology career can be: engineers and researchers, product managers, designers, data scientists, cloud specialists, and sales and marketing teams. Students interested in software or AI can explore Google's free learning resources and then check the Google careers site for current UK internships, apprenticeships and graduate roles. The pages we read do not describe those programmes in detail.

What they do

• {'desc': 'Finding information and places for billions of people.', 'title': 'Search and Maps'}
• {'desc': 'Video and the mobile operating system.', 'title': 'YouTube and Android'}
• {'desc': 'Cloud computing, data and AI tools for organisations.', 'title': 'Google Cloud'}
• {'desc': "Google's AI models and research lab.", 'title': 'Gemini and DeepMind'}

Key facts

• Founded: 1998 (Menlo Park, California), growing out of a Stanford research project begun in 1996
• Founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• Part of Alphabet since 2015; CEO Sundar Pichai
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California, USA
• Mission: organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
• UK: several London offices

Website: www.google.com