Main articles:History of Google and List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet.
See also: Alphabet Inc.
Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.
The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.
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Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from ,[21] co-founder of Sun Microsystems. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds.[40][41] Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had start up experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. David arranged a meeting with Page and Brin and his Granite co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The meeting was set for 8 a.m. at the front porch of David's home in Palo Alto and it had to be brief because Andy had another meeting at Cisco, where he now worked after the acquisition, at 9 a.m. Andy briefly tested a demo of the website, liked what he saw, and then went back to his car to grab the check. David Cheriton later also joined in with a $250,000 investment.
On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company that argued bias and "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions. 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.