Google LLC, where LLC means limited liability company, is an American technology company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its search engine, Google Search, ranks web pages in search results for each query. Its crawler, Googlebot, fetches the pages that the index stores.
History of Google
Creator: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with Scott Hassan (per Wikipedia). Year: 1998.
Google began in January 1996 as a research project. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran this project. Scott Hassan helped them. Their work became the PageRank algorithm. PageRank rates a page by the pages that link to it. Stanford University held the patent. The name Google is a misspelling of googol. A googol is the number 1. It is followed by 100 zeros.
In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim invested $100,000. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. That investment led to the company's incorporation. In June 2000, Google became the default search provider for Yahoo!. It replaced Inktomi in that role. Google AdWords started in October 2000. In February 2002, it added a cost-per-click model.
Google launched Google News in 2002. It launched AdSense in 2003. In 2003, the company leased an office complex. The address is 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway. It is in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex. Google went public in 2004. It did this through an initial public offering (IPO).
In 2015, Google was reorganized. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Sundar Pichai became chief executive officer (CEO) of Google in 2015. Google Search began to show AI Overviews in 2024. Wikipedia says Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites. They are the top two in the world.
The company offers products such as Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, YouTube and Android. Gmail is for email. Google Maps is for mapping. Chrome is for web browsing. YouTube is for video. Android runs on mobile devices. Advertising made up 73% of its total revenue in 2025.1
Changelog and latest update
Google Search began to show AI Overviews in 2024. Many search results start with an AI overview response. Wikipedia says so.
The Google logo changed on 19 May 2026. The Wikimedia Commons page says Google has used it since that date. It says the file comes from the Google website.
The Google Search Central updates page lists documentation changes. Each entry has a What line and a Why line. Each entry shows its date. In May 2026, Google recorded the removal of the FAQ rich result feature. It stopped appearing in Google Search on 7 May 2026. On 27 May 2026 preferred sources became available in AI Overviews and AI Mode. On 24 September 2026, Google recorded the creator property. It is in VideoObject structured data.
Latest update: Google Search Central documentation update, October 8, 2026, 2026-10-08
On 8 October 2026 Google added a page on the UGC Fresh Data Program. The page explains the program. It lists who may apply. It explains how applicants can take part. The update appears on the Google Search Central updates page. That page also has an RSS feed.
Usage examples
Site owners meet Google through three parts. The first is the robots.txt file. It sets rules for the Googlebot crawler. The second is the search operators. They test what Google has indexed. The third is the reverse DNS check. It confirms that a visit came from the real crawler. The three examples below change no site. They show the rule, the search and the check.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cart/
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xmlThis robots.txt file tells the Googlebot crawler not to fetch pages in the /cart/ folder. The Sitemap line gives the address of the sitemap index. The crawler uses it to find the pages of the site. The file goes in the root folder of the domain. The crawler reads it before it fetches other pages.
site:example.com
site:example.com "city page"The site: operator limits a Google search to one domain. The first line lists the indexed pages of the domain. The second line adds a phrase. The results then show only pages that contain it. A site owner uses these queries to check which pages Google has indexed.
host 66.249.66.1
host crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.comThe first command runs a reverse DNS lookup on an address from the server log. A name ending in googlebot.com means the address belongs to Google. The second command runs the forward lookup on that name. The result must match the original address. Google documents this two-step check on its verification page.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Google
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on the company Google LLC. It covers the 1996 research project, the 1998 founding, the 2004 initial public offering, the 2015 reorganization under Alphabet and the products the company offers. Each statement carries a numbered citation to its source.
About Google
Google
The official company information page of Google. It describes the company history, the office locations, the commitments and the initiatives of the company. It is the primary source for the company's own statements about its history and operations.
Google Search Central updates
Google Search Central
The Google page that lists dated changes to the Search Central documentation, with an entry for each change and its reason. It includes 2026 entries such as the October 8, 2026 UGC Fresh Data Program page. It also provides a feed URL for readers who track the updates.
What is Googlebot
Google Search Central
Google's documentation of Googlebot, the crawler that fetches pages for Google Search. The page lists the robots.txt and sitemap topics that guide how the crawler finds and fetches the pages of a site. It is the primary source for the crawler's role in Google Search.
Verifying Googlebot and other Google crawlers
Google Search Central
Google's guide to verifying that a request came from Googlebot or another Google crawler. It explains the reverse DNS and forward DNS steps, using the host command. It also lists the IP address ranges that Google publishes for each crawler.
Google Search Central updates
Google Search Central
Google dated list of changes to its Search documentation, with an RSS feed. It records the October 8, 2026 UGC Fresh Data Program page, the May 2026 FAQ rich result removal and the May 27, 2026 preferred sources update.
Local searches from Omaha to Norfolk
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