Company: Alphabet Inc.
Brand Value: $286,258 Million
Category: Technology
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
Year formed: 1998
Google is today one of the world’s most recognized brands. Begun as a research project at Stanford University, the company entered the crowded search engine space in 1998 and quickly distinguished itself through its Page Rank algorithm, which displayed content based on its relative importance to users. From the outset, its official mission was “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Today, Google is a dominant player in search, with almost all of its revenue coming from advertising. To consumers, it continually makes headlines for innovative products, like self-driving cars, Google Home, and its inexpensive Cardboard VR experience. Google also maintains the Android OS, which is the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Early on, Google had an unofficial (and occasionally ridiculed) slogan, “Don’t be evil,” which was replaced in 2015 by the Alphabet corporate code of conduct, which urges its employees to “Do the right thing.” The brand currently has 1.17 billion monthly unique visitors, and accounted for 13% of all advertising globally last year.
