Google is a web search engine founded by Larry Page and Sergei Brin; they met in 1995 at Stanford University, aged 22 and 21 respectively, and started their firm in 1996. They worked on the search engine of the university and decided to call their engine Google, a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.The complete history of Google is available here.

Google is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange (GOOG) since August 2004; the initial public offering price was 38$, in May 2012 the stock price was 604$. "Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information. We aspire to build products that improve the lives of billions of people globally. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."