Google Inc. is the world-renown American Internet and software corporation that specializes in Internet searches, cloud computing, and advertising. Most of Google’s profits strain from its AdWords program which offers pay-per-click, cost-per-thousand, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads.

It was on this day, September 4, 1998, that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google while attending Stanford University together as PhD students. The whole idea came from them wanting to create a system that analyzed the relationship between websites to rank search engine results, which they called PageRank. Google rapidly grew and offers programs such as their Gmail email service, Google Chrome web browser, Google Docs, and Google+ social networking. Google also owns popular websites such as YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut.

Google has been incredibly successful, with a record of over one billion monthly visitors in May of 2011. In 2009, it was listed as the Internet’s most visited website. Google employs over 30,000 employees and its total revenue in 2011 reached nearly 38 billion dollars.