Company
ActiveMountain View · Since 1998
Still operating, inside Alphabet, the holding company created in 2015. Search advertising remains the business that pays for the rest.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 to rank the web by the links pages made to each other. The ranking was the product users saw. The product that employed an industry was the advertising sold against it, priced by the click and aimed by what the search had revealed.
Google hired engineers at a scale universities noticed, and it hired the people who sold the ads, reviewed them, and kept the data centers running. A large part of the public web's other employers, the publishers and the small businesses, came to depend on the traffic.
An advertising machine with a research staff
The unusual jobs were the ones that did not look like sales. A site-reliability engineer kept a service up for a billion users. A policy reviewer decided which ads could run. Linguists and contractors labeled data. In 2015 the founders created Alphabet as a holding company, with Google the subsidiary that earns the money and other bets sitting beside it. The name on the paycheck for most of the staff is still Google.
Present company, projected roles
Google remains inside Alphabet and remains an independent public company in the ordinary sense. Quantum computing research and workplace AI, which later chapters mention, are real projects and not yet the business. This page describes the firm founded in 1998. Where the timeline imagines it as the landlord of a future office, the chapter is labeled a projection.
The work it organized
- Software engineer
- Ad reviewer
- Site-reliability engineer
- Data-center technician