About Google: Our products, technology and company information

After some additional small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors casina casino review including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a misspelling of the word googol, a very large number written (1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998.

Consumer Rights

It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. An assault is committed when the defendant intentionally or recklessly causes another to apprehend immediate and unlawful violence and battery is For annotated notes across the thousands of acts in our database, register for a free Lexis+ trial Practice notes provide up-to-date explanations of the law, helping you to respond with speed and accuracy.

Changes over time for: Section 9

In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. In Spring 2009, Google hired a herd of 200 goats for a week from California Grazing to mow their lawn.
Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. The lawsuit became known in March 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case, ruling that they must face the group's charges. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company.

Enterprise services

Another suit was brought against Google in 2023 for illegally monopolizing the advertising technology market. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by "imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites" that required them to exclude search results from Google's rivals. On March 20, 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion) fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to "compete and innovate fairly" in the online advertising market. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for "promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results". Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari.

Europe

Free law study resources For more information see the EUR-Lex public statement on re-use. All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. The first date in the timeline will usually be the earliest date when the provision came into force. This timeline shows the different points in time where a change occurred. Explanatory Notes were introduced in 1999 and accompany all Public Acts except Appropriation, Consolidated Fund, Finance and Consolidation Acts.

  • In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal.
  • In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
  • The Consumer Rights Act 2015 (the “CRA 2015”) is generally regarded as a significant piece of legislation in the area of consumer rights.
  • Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by «advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace», and he was fired on the same day.
  • Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens.
  • The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.
  • The first date in the timeline will usually be the earliest date when the provision came into force.
  • Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings.
  • On March 20, 2019, the European Commission imposed a €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion) fine on Google for preventing rivals from being able to «compete and innovate fairly» in the online advertising market.
  • On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to «non-public» Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users.
  • He sold part of the land adjoining the station to Classique Coaches Ltd, a coach company.
  • For digital content which does not meet the statutory standards, consumers have the right to require the trader to repair or replace the item within a reasonable time and a right to a price reduction and refund.

Employees are split into six hierarchies based on experience and can range "from entry-level data center workers at level one to managers and experienced engineers at level six". As of September 30, 2020,update Alphabet Inc. had 132,121 employees, of which more than 100,000 worked for Google. In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet. Its first on April 1, 2000, was Google MentalPlex which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed "Doodlers".
In addition, the CRA 2015 seeks to modernise the law to enable it to deal with developments in the digital landscape (such as online streaming) and to implement certain provisions of the EU Consumer Rights Directive (e.g. specifying the consumer’s cancellation rights for relevant contracts concluded off-premises or through distance trading). In May 2017, Google enabled a new "Personal" tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. The implementation of the CRA 2015 heralds a new legal era for consumers, and goes a long way in addressing the perceived shortcomings in the law on consumer rights, although it remains to be seen if further reform is required. More notably, Chapter 3 of Part 1 of the CRA 2015 introduces new consumer rights and remedies in respect of digital content.
Changes that have been made appear in the content and are referenced with annotations.

Antitrust

Most employees were also working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day.
In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
In September 2024, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices in the online advertising technology market, potentially harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. The DoJ also sought a ban on Google re-entering the browser market for five years and restrictions on its investments in rival search or AI technologies. In August 2024, District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google held a monopoly in online search and text advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to "non-public" Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. The lawsuit alleged that Google engaged in anticompetitive behavior by paying Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on October 20, 2020, asserting that it has illegally maintained its monopoly position in web search and search advertising. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies.
In 2025, Google announced SynthID Detector, a tool that uses watermarking to identify whether content such as text, images, audio, or video was generated using Google products. In 2007, Google launched "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from its acquisition of DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history. This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings.