Google Inc.
is an American software company best known for its search and internet
advertising services. Through its own product developments, as well
as acquisitions, Google also now offers online mapping, news, various
types of business application software, email (Gmail), video sharing (through the YouTube web site which it owns),
and blogging (through the Blogger web site). Additionally, the
company has begun to experiment with offline advertising in radio and
print media, and in
2006,
purchased the radio advertising company, dMarc.
The company was originally founded in
1998
and is headquartered in
Mountain View,
California.
Google went public in
August 19th2004,
and is today listed on both the NASDAQ and London Stock Exchange (LSE) under the tickers
GOOG and GGEA respectively. Google employs over 13,000 (as
June 2007),
and had net revenues of over US $10.6 billion, and net income of over US $3 billion in
2006.
The vast majority of the company's revenue comes from advertising programs: for example, in
2006,
the company reported revenue of US $10,492 million from advertising, but just
US $112 million from licensing and other sources, which equates to almost a 99:1 ratio.
Although Google retains many proprietary technologies (most famously its search engine
and AdWords/AdSense advertising system, but many others too), the company is heavy user of
open source software.
For example, Google runs its Internet applications on a server-farm containing
computers running a stripped-down version of Linux.
Since
2005,
the company has contributed back to the
open source
community by operating an annual program, known as the "Google Summer of Code",
by which students who complete approved
open source projects during the
Summer, are rewarded with funding.
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