With a portfolio of products and services that span search, advertising, software and hardware, the Google net worth is among the highest in the business world.
Most web users utilise Google. Furthermore, it processes more than 1.2 trillion search queries per year. Practically everyone around the world knows of Google. Yet, few have heard of the search giant’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.
The company was restructured in 2013, as a way to separate their other ventures from the Google brand. This choice has seen its market cap rise by more than $250 billion.
Google net worth: Where did it all begin?
Google is the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two entrepreneurs formed it from studying backlinks as part of their PhD studies at Stanford in the mid-nineties.
Motivated to create a system that gave insight into a webpage’s importance, ‘BackRub’ was born. The system crawled the web and used its findings to rank pages based on the number of backlinks that each page had received.
They made a makeshift office in Page’s dorm room. However, the service quickly outgrew its humble beginnings.
Within one month of forming as a company in 1998, Google was processing 10,000 searches a day. They were achieving a similar search volume per second by 2006, but the search engine’s fame has boomed over the last decade, with over 40,000 searches now performed per second.
The company has since grow from the search engine market, developing, releasing and acquiring a range products and technologies, including email service Gmail, the Pixel smartphone, the Google+ social network and video-sharing platform YouTube.
As a result, the Google net worth has similarly soared. When Google first became a publicly traded company in 2004, its market cap stood at about $23 billion. That figure has since reached $663 billion.
Despite Alphabet’s numerous revenue streams, approximately 96% of their earnings are still come from advertising services. Furthermore, 70% of that comes from their AdWords service, which allows website owners to pay for their sites to feature for certain keywords on a Google search results page.
Read more:
Sundar Pichai net worth: Google’s CEO has an amazing rags to riches tale