What it Does: Google offers Internet-related services and products, including online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Mission: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. They do this by providing search services that make finding the right information easy, creating effective advertising solutions, and building products like Gmail and Google Chrome that users can all rely on.
Size and Presence: Google has over 50 offices in India and more than 10,000 workers. The company's first India office was set up in 2009. Google's largest campus outside of the US is its Bengaluru campus, which employs over 7,000 people.
Best Known For: Google is the world's largest search engine, the world's largest online advertising platform, and one of the world's most valuable publicly traded companies.
The Good Bits: Google has a reputation for being a great place to work, and it's not hard to see why. The company is known for offering employees an attractive compensation package, including health benefits, a retirement plan, and all sorts of perks—from free lunches to subsidized massages.
Google was incorporated in 1998 by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and other Stanford University PhD students to search the vast amount of online information.
The students had similar interests, especially in how to make a better search engine. They decided to create their search engine together but soon realized it wouldn't be easy.
They started working on the project together in 1996 while they were still graduate students at Stanford University's Department of Computer Science. Their research project was initially called "Backrub," but they soon renamed it Google (a play on Googol, which is the number one followed by 100 zeros). In March 1997, they formally incorporated Google Inc., with the help of Susan Wojcicki (now CEO of YouTube).
The first Google office was located in Menlo Park, California. It was an odd office space — no cubicles, and employees worked on desks made out of doors. In 1998, Google's home page only showed 25 results for any given query. Today it shows over 10 billion results!
Google has a strong engineering culture focusing on innovation and making things better for the world. They hire people who want to change the world and make it better through technology. Google offers its employees many perks, including free food, fitness classes, and childcare services.
A large number of Google employees are hired through campus placements. Google has a rigorous recruitment process for all its roles, including software engineers and marketing professionals.
The recruitment process starts with submitting an online application form, followed by a video-based online test (for some roles). If you clear this test, you will be invited for an on-campus interview (either at your university or Google's office).
If you pass this round of interviews, you will be invited for another round of interviews, including group exercises and case studies.
Google offers excellent training opportunities for employees who want to grow their careers. This includes learning about data science and machine learning through their internal programs and partnerships with companies like Udacity and Coursera.
An analyst at Google earns about INR 720000 per annum, while a data analyst earns INR 1770000 per year.
To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, they regularly release new tools, applications, and features to help make information more accessible to everyone.
In May 2018, Google came under fire after it was revealed that its Street View cars had been collecting Wi-Fi data transmitted over open networks as they moved around neighbourhoods photographing streetscapes. The company eventually admitted that it had collected personal data such as emails, passwords, and Internet usage history from unsecured wireless networks while taking pictures for Street View around the world between 2008 and 2010. In response to these concerns, the Federal Communications Commission fined Google $25,000 for obstructing its investigation into how much data was collected by its Street View cars.