How big is Google?

Google is an American multinational technology company specialising in internet related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engines, cloud computing platforms, software and hardware. They also offer various other services designed especially for work and productivity, scheduling and time management, instant messaging and video chat, language translation, maps and navigation, video sharing and of course, mobile OS (Android).

Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were Ph.D students at Stanford University, in California.

In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganise its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc, and upon the completion of the restructure, Sundar Pichai became the CEO of google by replacing Larry Page who became the CEO of Alphabet Inc.

Ever since 1996, Google has been growing everyday. From providing you services like it’s Search Engine to prompting you about traffic and weather conditions for your area, Google probably knows more about you than you yourself. Their rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships that extend its reach beyond Google core search engine.

Here is a list of Companies/Brands that fall under –

1. Alphabet Inc – The American multinational conglomerate founded on October 2, 2015, established by the founders of Google, Larry Page (serving as CEO) and Sergei Brin (serving as President), with their headquarters in Mountain View, California.
2. Android – A mobile operating system initially developed by a company named Android Inc which was eventually bought by Google in 2005, Android OS is based on the LINUX Kernel and designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android’s User Interface is mainly based on direct manipulation, using touch gestures that loosely correspond to real-world actions, such as swiping, tapping and pinching, to manipulate on-screen objects, along with a virtual keyboard for text input. In addition to touchscreen devices, Google has further developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars, and Android Wear for wrist watches, each with a specialised user interface. Variants of Android are also used on notebooks, game consoles, digital cameras, and other electronics.
3. AdSense – A program run by Google that allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements, that are targeted to site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google launched its AdSense program, originally named content targeting advertising in March 2003. The AdSense name was originally used by Applied Semantics, a competitive offering to AdSense. The name was adopted by Google after Google acquired Applied Semantics in April 2003.
4. Analytics – Google Analytics is a freemium (A pricing Strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering or application such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (in terms of premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods.) web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005, and then launched the service in November of the same year, after the acquisition. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. Integrated with AdSense, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. Google offers free Google Analytics IQ Lessons, Google Analytics certification test, free Help Center FAQ and Google Groups forum for official Google Analytics product support.
5. AdMob – AdMob is a mobile advertising company founded by Omar Hamoui. The name AdMob is a portmanteau for “advertising on mobile”. It was incorporated on April 10, 2006. The company is based in Mountain View, California. In November 2009 it was acquired by Google for $750 million. The acquisition was completed on May 27, 2010. Apple Inc. had also expressed interest in purchasing the company the same year, but they were out-bid by Google. Prior to being acquired by Google, AdMob acquired the company AdWhirl, formerly Adrollo, which is a platform for developing advertisements in iPhone applications. AdMob is one of the world’s largest mobile advertising platforms and claims to serve more than 40 billion mobile banner and text ads per month across mobile Web sites and handset applications.
6. Alerts – Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user’s search term(s).
7. Blogger – is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs on August 23, 1999, which was later bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a sub-domain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be hosted in the registered custom domain of the blogger (like http://www.example.com). A user can have up to 100 blogs per account. Blogger has also launched mobile applications for users with mobile devices. Users can post and edit blogs, and also share photos and links on Blogger through their mobile devices. Not only advanced mobile devices, such as smartphones, are being considered, since users can also post blogs via traditional cell phones by SMS and MMS. The major two mobile operating systems that Blogger focuses on are Android and iOS.
8. Boston Dynamics – Boston Dynamics began as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Marc Raibert and his colleagues first developed robots that ran and maneuvered  like animals. They founded the company in 1992. Boston Dynamics now builds advanced robots with remarkable behaviour: mobility, agility, dexterity and speed. On 13 December 2013, the company was acquired by Google X (a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.) for an unknown price. They use sensor-based controls and computation to unlock the capabilities of complex mechanisms. Being an engineering and robotics design company they are best known for the development of BigDog, a quadruped robot designed for the U.S. military with funding from Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other organisations such as the the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
9. Calico – An independent research and development biotech company founded on September 18, 2013 by Google and Arthur D. Levinson with the goal of combating ageing and associated diseases. In Google’s 2013 Founders’ Letter, Larry Page described Calico as a company focused on “health, well-being, and longevity.” The company’s name is an acronym for “California Life Company”. In August 2015, Google announced plans to restructure into Alphabet Inc., wherein Google and Calico would become two of the subsidiaries of the new company along with others. This was completed on October 2.
10. CapitalG – Formerly Google Capital, is the late-stage growth venture capital fund financed by Alphabet Inc., and based in San Francisco, CA. Founded in 2013, it focuses on larger, growth stage technology companies, and invests for profit rather than strategically for Google. In addition to capital investment, CapitalG’s approach includes giving portfolio companies access to Google’s people, knowledge, and culture to support the companies’ growth and offer them guidance. In November 2016, Google Capital was re-branded as CapitalG. On August 10, 2015, Google Inc. announced plans for a corporate restructuring wherein CapitalG would become the subsidiary of the new umbrella company, Alphabet Inc.
11. DeepMind – DeepMind Technologies Limited is a British Artificial Intelligence company founded in September 2010. It was acquired by Google in 2014. The company has created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans. The company made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat a human professional Go player for the first time. The start-up was initially founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman in 2010. After Google’s acquisition the company established an Artificial Intelligence Ethics board. The ethics board for AI research remains a mystery, with both Google and DeepMind declining to reveal who sits on the board. DeepMind, together with Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft, is a member of Partnership on AI, an organisation devoted to the society, called – AI interface.
12. Express –  Google Express, formerly Google Shopping Express, is a shopping service from Google that was launched on a free trial basis in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in spring 2013, and publicly in September that year. In spring 2014, it was expanded to New York City and Los Angeles, and in fall 2014 to Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC. Originally it was a same-day service mode that was followed by then, but now it offers same-day and overnight delivery.The service was first announced in March 2013, from San Francisco as far south as San Jose. Retailers include a mix of national and local stores. It was publicly launched on September 25, 2013, with some added retailers but still temporarily restricted to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Apps for Android and Apple Smartphones were announced the same day. The service displays a map of the merchandise pickup and delivery locations, and attempts to use the nearest available outlet.
13. Fiber – Google Fiber is part of the Access division of Alphabet Inc. It provides fiber-to the premises service in the United States, providing broadband internet and IPTV to a small and slowly increasing number of locations. In mid-2016, Google Fiber had 68,715 television subscribers and was estimated to have about 453,000 broadband customers. Google fiber offers four options, depending on your location: a free internet option, a 100Mbit/s option, a Gbit/s Internet option, and an option including television service ( in addition to the 1Gbit/s internet). The internet services includes one terbyte of google drive service; the television service includes a two terabyte DVR in addition to the google drive. In order to avoid underground cabling complexity, Google Fiber relies on aggregators dubbed Google Fiber Huts. From these Google Fiber Huts, the fiber cables travel along utility poles into neighborhoods and homes, and stop at a Fiber Jack (an Optical Network Terminal or ONT) in each home. The estimated cost of wiring a fiber network like Google Fiber into a major American city is $1 billion.
14. Fi – Project Fi is a mobile virtual network operator by Google, providing phone, messaging, and data services using both Wi-Fi and Cellular networks belonging to Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular and Three. The service was launched on April 22, 2015 for the Nexus 6 through invitations only. The invitation system was dropped in March 2016, and support for additional devices, including the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, was introduced in October.Project Fi automatically switches between networks depending on signal strength and speed. It automatically connects to a Wi-Fi hotspot with data encryption through an automatic VPN. Phone calls seamlessly transition between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. With all networks combined, Project Fi covers more than 135+ places around the world. Plans are based on a flat-rate, in which a subscription costs $20 per month for unlimited calls and messaging. Money for unused data is credited back to the user’s account, while overuse of data costs $10 per Gigabyte. Project Fi has received positive reviews. Critics who tested the service for six months praised its pricing strategy, especially the money-back feature for unused data. They also enjoyed the “seamless” transition between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and one critic enjoyed the customer service experience.
15. Firebase – Firebase evolved from Envolve, a prior startup founded by James Tamplin and Andrew Lee in 2011. Envolve provided developers an API that let them integrate online chat into their websites. After releasing the chat service, Tamplin and Lee found that the service was being used to pass application data that wasn’t chat messages. Developers were using Envolve to sync application data such as game state in realtime across their users. Tamplin and Lee decided to separate the chat system and the real-time architecture that powered it, founding Firebase as a separate company in April 2012. Firebase raised $1.4 million in seed funding in May 2012 from Flybridge Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, NEA and others. Firebase is a mobile and web application development platform. Firebase is made up of complementary features that developers can mix-and-match to fit their needs. The team is based in San Francisco and Mountain View, California. Firebase’s initial product was a realtime database, which provides an API that allows developers to store and sync data across multiple clients. Over time, it has expanded its product line to become a full suite for app development. The company was acquired by Google in October 2014 and a significant number of new features were featured in May 2016 at Google I/O.
16. Google glass – Google Glass is an optical head-mounted display designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses. It was developed by ‘X’ (previously Google X) with the mission of producing a ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displayed information in a smartphone-like hands-free format. Wearers communicated with the Internet via natural language voice commands. Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified “Glass Explorers” in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014. It also had a camera attached to it. The headset originally received a great deal of criticism and legislative action due to privacy and safety concerns. On January 15, 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype.
17. Hangouts – Google Hangouts is a communication platform developed by Google which includes instant messaging, video chat, SMS, VOIP features. It replaces three messaging products that Google had implemented concurrently within its services, including Google Talk, Google+ Messenger (formerly: Huddle), and Hangouts, a video chat system present within Google+. Google has also stated that Hangouts is designed to be “the future” of its telephony product, Google Voice, and integrated some of the capabilities of Google Voice into Hangouts. You can use people’s Google+ accounts to message them. Hangouts allows conversations between two or more users. The service can be accessed online through the GMail or Google+ websites, or through mobile Apps available for Android and iOS (which were distributed as a successor to their existing Google Talk apps). However, because it uses a proprietary protocol instead of the XMPP Open Standard protocol used by Google Talk, most third-party applications which had access to Google Talk do not have access to Google+ Hangouts.
18. Ingress – Ingress is a location-based, augmented-reality mobile game developed by Niantic, a company spun off from Google. The game was first released for Android devices on November 15, 2012, and later for iOS on July 14, 2014. The game has a science fiction back story with a continuous open narrative. Ingress is also considered to be a location-based exergame. The game makers’ framing device for the game is as follows: Alongside the discovery of the Higgs Boson by the physicists at CERN in 2012, it has also been discovered that the Earth has been seeded with “Exotic Matter,” or XM. This substance has been associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race.
19. Invite Media – Invite Media is a display advertising and exchange bidding company that was acquired by DoubleClick, a subsidiary of Google Inc. on June 3, 2010 for $81 million.                                                                                                                    
20. Jump – Google Jump refers to a 360 degree camera software. It is 3D, so it can be used with Virtual Reality devices. It creates a panorama 360 degrees wide. The Jump camera rig includes 16 separate cameras. The software uses GoPRo Odyssey with the HERO 4 module. It comes with Jump assembler which assembles the 16 different video feeds into one, 360 degree video. Jump is Google’s professional VR video solution. Jump makes 3D-360 video production at scale possible with best-in-class automated stitching. Jump cameras are designed to work with the Jump Assembler to enable seamless VR video production.
21. Verily Life Sciences – Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) is Alphabet Inc.’s research organisation devoted to the study of life sciences. The organisation was formerly a division of Google X, until 10 August 2015 when Sergey Brin announced that the organisation would become an independent subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google Life Sciences was renamed Verily. Verily is currently developing tools to collect and organise health data, then creating interventions and platforms that put insights derived from that health data to use for more holistic care management. We have three guiding product design principles: start with the user, simplify care, and lead on security and privacy.
22. Loon – Project Loon is a research and development project being developed by X (formerly Google X) with the mission of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. The project uses high-altitude balloons placed in the stratosphere at an altitude of about 18 km (11 mi) to create an aerial wireless network with up to 4G-LTE speeds. It was named Project Loon, since even Google itself found the idea of providing Internet access to the remaining 5 billion population unprecedented and crazy/loony. The balloons use patch antennas – which are directional antennas – to transmit signals to ground stations or LTE users. Some smartphones with Google SIM cards can use Google Internet services. The whole infrastructure is based on LTE; the eNodeB component (the equivalent of the “base station” that talks directly to handsets) is carried in the balloon. Project Loon balloons are designed and manufactured at scale to survive the conditions in the stratosphere, where winds can blow over 100 km/hr and the thin atmosphere offers little protection from UV radiation and dramatic temperature swings which can reach as low as -90°C. Made from sheets of polyethylene, each tennis court sized balloon is built to last more than 100 days in the stratosphere before returning to the ground in a controlled descent.
23. Power –  Makani Power is an Almeda, California-based company that developed airborne wind turbines with the support of Google X and the U.S. Department of energy office of ARPA-E. Makani is a leader in the development of airborne wind power extraction systems. Makani was founded in 2006 by Saul griffith, Don Montague, and Corwin Hardham. It received funding as part of Google.org’s Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. Makani is Hawaiian for “wind.” One of the founders, Corwin Hardham, died in 2012 at age 38. Makani is working to make clean energy accessible for everyone. We’re developing energy kites, a new type of wind turbine that can access stronger and steadier winds at higher altitudes to generate more energy with less materials. Makani’s energy kite uses the same aerodynamic principles as a conventional wind turbine, but replaces tons of steel with lightweight electronics, advanced materials, and smart software.
24. Nexus – Google Nexus is a line of consumer electronic devices that run the Android operating system. Google manages the design, development, marketing, and support of these devices, but some development and all manufacturing are carried out by partnering with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
25. Picasa – Picasa is a discontinued image organiser and image viewer for organising and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time may have resided at IdeaLab) in 2002. In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from Lifescape and began offering it as freeware. “Picasa” is a blend of the name of Spanish painter PAblo Picasso, the phrase “mi casa” (Spanish for “my house”) and “pic” for pictures. On February 12, 2016, Google announced it was discontinuing support for Picasa Desktop and Web Albums, effective March 15, 2016, and focusing on the cloud-based Google Photos as its successor.
26. OpenRefine – OpenRefine, formerly called Google Refine, is a standalone open source desktop application for data cleanup and transformation to other formats, the activity known as data wrangling. It is similar to spreadsheet applications (and can work with spreadsheet file formats); however, it behaves more like a database.It operates on rows of data which have cells under columns, which is very similar to relational database tables. An OpenRefine project consists of one table. The user can filter the rows to display using facets that define filtering criteria (for example, showing rows where a given column is not empty).
27. Shop – Google Shopping, formerly Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle, is a Google service invented by Craig Nevill-Manning which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendors. Originally, the service listed prices submitted by merchants, and was monetised through AdWords advertising like other Google services. However, in May 2012, Google announced that the service (which was also immediately renamed Google Shopping) would shift in late-2012 to a paid model where merchants would have to pay the company in order to list their products on the service.
28. SageTV – SageTV Media Center, now open source, was a proprietary, commercial DVR (Digital Video Recording) and HTPC (Home theater PC) software for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It requires that the host computer have a hardware-based TV tuner card. The SageTV software has an integrated Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) that is updated via the Internet. The program provides a television interface for DVR, music, and photos on Windows and Linux. SageTV Media Center typically records in standard MPEG2, making it possible to transfer recordings to laptops or other devices. It also has a built-in conversion feature to transcode files into other formats compatible with iPod, PSP, cell phones and other portable devices.After the acquisition of SageTV, LLC by Google, they began modifying and updating it to work with Google’s upcoming Google Fiber TV service. SageTV v8 was the initial platform used for the Google Fiber Storage Box (DVR) and TV Box (Client). It has since been replaced with an in-house developed software. SageTV software also includes a SageTV Studio Development GUI that allows the customisation of the user interface and development of add-ons.
29. StackDriver – Stackdriver is a cloud computing systems management firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. They aim to help DevOps manage large, distributed applications running in the public cloud. It visualises application, system and infrastructure, metrics and also provides a policy system to alert users when predefined thresholds are breached. Following a $5 million investment by Bain Capital Ventures in 2012, they entered public beta on April 30, 2013. In May 2014, they were acquired by Google.
30. Terra Bella – Terra Bella (formerly Skybox Imaging) is a Planet Labs subsidiary providing commercial high-resolution Earth Observation satellite imagery, high-definition video and analytics services. The Mountain View, California-based company was founded in 2009 by Dan Berkenstock, Julian Mann, John Fenwick, and Ching-Yu Hu, and was acquired by Google in 2014. On April 18, 2017, Google completed the sale of Terra Bella and its SkySat satellite constellation to Planet Labs and entered into a multi-year agreement to purchase SkySat imaging data. The resolution of the SkySat satellite imagery and videos is high enough to observe objects that impact the global economy such as terrain, cars and shipping containers. Terra Bella says its satellites can capture video clips lasting up to 90 seconds at 30 frames per second. The SkySat satellites are based on the CubeSat concept with optimised design using inexpensive automotive grade electronics, as well as fast commercially available processors. The cameras use two-dimensional imaging sensors.
31. Skia – The Skia Graphics Engine is a compact open source graphic library written in C++. Skia Inc. originally developed the library; Google acquired it in 2005, and then released the software as open source licensed under the New BSD free software license. Now known as Skia, the library is used as of 2017 in GoogleChrome, Chrome OS, Chromium OS, Mozilla Firefox, Android (although partially superseded by libhwui starting with Android 3.0), Firefox OS, and Sublime Text 3. The Skia library is also present on the Blackberry PlayBook though the extent of its usage is unclear.
32. Scholar – Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-viewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents. While Google does not publish the size of Google Scholar’s database, third-party researchers estimated it to contain roughly 160 million documents as of May 2014 and an earlier statistical estimate published in PLOS ONE using a Mark and recapture method estimated approximately 80-90% coverage of all articles published in English with an estimate of 100 million. This estimate also determined how many documents were freely available on the web.
33. Tango –  (formerly named Project Tango, while in-testing) is an augmented reality computing platform, developed and authored by Google. It uses computer vision to enable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. This allows application developers to create user experiences that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, physical space measurement, environmental recognition, augmented reality, and windows into a virtual world. Google has produced two devices to demonstrate the Tango technology: the discontinued Peanut phone and the Yellowstone 7-inch tablet. At CES, in January 2016, Google announced a partnership with Lenovo to release a consumer smartphone during the summer of 2016 to feature Tango technology marketed at consumers, noting a less than $500 price-point and a small form factor below 6.5 inches. Tango is different from other emerging 3D-sensing computer vision products, in that it’s designed to run on a standalone mobile phone or tablet and is chiefly concerned with determining the device’s position and orientation within the environment.The software works by integrating three types of functionality:
    • Motion tracking: using visual features of the environment, in combination with accelerometer and gyroscope data, to closely track the device’s movements in space.
    • Area learning: storing environment data in a map that can be re-used later, shared with other Tango devices, and enhanced with metadata such as notes, instructions, or points of interest.
    • Depth Perception: detecting distances, sizes, and surfaces in the environment.

    Together, these generate data about the device in “six degrees of freedom” (3 axes of orientation plus 3 axes of motion) and detailed three-dimensional information about the environment. Project tango was also the first project to graduate from Google X in 2012.

34. VirusTotal – VirusTotal is a website created by the Spanish security company Hispasec Sistemas. Launched in June 2004, it was acquired by Google Inc. in September 2012. VirusTotal aggregates many antivirus products and online scan engines to check for viruses that the user’s own antivirus may have missed, or to verify against any false positives. Files up to 128 MB can be uploaded to the website or sent via email. Anti-virus software vendors can receive copies of files that were flagged by other scans but passed by their own engine, to help improve their software and, by extension, VirusTotal’s own capability.
35. Google Ventures – GV, formerly Google Ventures, is the venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc. and provides seed,venture, and growth stage funding to technology companies. The firm operates independently from Google and makes financially driven investment decisions. GV seeks to invest in startup companies in a variety of fields ranging from the Internet, Software, and hardware to life science, healthcare, artificial intelligence, transportation, cyber security and agriculture. GV was founded as Google Ventures in 2009. GV has offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, New York City, Cambridge and London.
36. Wing – Google’s parent company Alphabet has a bold plan to make commercial drone deliveries a reality by 2017 as part of Project Wing, and it got a huge boost in that direction Tuesday. Google X, the division of Alphabet responsible for Project Wing, got approval from the White House to test Project Wing on a U.S. site. The drones will be tested at one of the six sites approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
37. X – Google X, an American semi-secret research-and-development facility founded by Google in January 2010 as Google X, operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. X has its headquarters about a half mile from Google’s corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. Work at X is overseen by entrepreneur scientist Astro Teller, as CEO and “Captain of Moonshots”. The lab started with the development of Google’s self-driving car.

Phew, long list that was.

Until next time, folks!