What is Google?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford. In 2015, Google reorganized under a new holding company, Alphabet Inc., and it remains Alphabet’s largest business today. Google holds about 91% of the global search engine market, according to StatCounter (June 2026), and handles more than 5 trillion searches a year by its own count.

How does Google Search work?

Google Search works in three stages: crawling, indexing, and serving ranked results.

1. Crawling. Automated programs called crawlers follow links across the web to discover pages.
2. Indexing. Google analyzes each page and stores it in a giant database called the index.
3. Ranking and serving. When someone searches, Google’s algorithms sort the indexed pages and serve the most relevant results, along with ads and AI-generated answer summaries (Google’s AI Overviews).

Google updates these algorithms constantly, and larger algorithm updates can noticeably reshuffle rankings.

What products does Google offer?

Search is the front door, but Google makes far more: Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, the Android operating system, Google Drive and Workspace, and Google Cloud for businesses. Most are free to use; advertising pays the bills.

Why does Google matter for your website?

For most websites, no single channel sends more visitors than Google search, which is why search engine optimization (SEO) is largely about meeting Google’s standards. Google’s guidance rewards fast, secure sites with helpful, original content. Free tools like Google Search Console show you how your site appears in results and what people searched to find it.