In 1998, two Stanford University PhD students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, created a search engine that would later change the way we access information. Google Inc., as the company would be called, operated out of a garage in California and became a household name. The company’s mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
The company was a success. In August 2004 Google went public on the Nasdaq, valuing the company at $27 billion. In 2006, Google bought YouTube and started its global expansion. In 2011, Google launched its own smartphone operating system (Android), made acquisitions such as online mapping service Waze and robotics company Boston Dynamics, and began experimenting with self-driving cars. In August 2015, Google Inc. restructured its interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. As of 2015, the corporation’s chief executive officer was Larry Page and the company’s headquarters was located in Mountain View, California. Google is the world’s largest Internet company by revenue, and the third-largest behind Apple and Amazon.com according to market capitalization.
Google has developed a number of other products and services, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth. While some of these products have been more successful than others, all of them have helped to make Google one of the most popular websites on the internet.
Gmail
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service developed by Google. Users may access Gmail as webmail, or through the Gmail mobile app for Android and iOS devices. Gmail offers users up to 15 gigabytes of storage space, compared to the 2 gigabytes offered by Yahoo! Mail and the 1 gigabyte offered by Outlook.com. The service is considered one of the most popular email services in the world, with over 425 million active users (as of 2017) and has one of the highest rates of activity, with an average of 60 billion emails sent and received per day. Gmail was announced in a press conference on April 1, 2004, and began beta testing on April 21, 2004. It exited beta testing later that year on July 7, 2004. On April 1, 2009, Google launched Gmail (beta) for mobile devices. Gmail quickly gained traction and has become one of the world’s most popular email services. It currently holds the second-highest market share among e-mail services in terms of number of users, after Outlook with 27.8% (as of 2017), with Yahoo Mail third with 9.