Google

Google Inc. is an internet search engine company that was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is currently the most popular search engine on the internet. Among the services offered by Google are Google Mail, Google Video, and Google Maps. Google Inc. is also the owner of several other websites and companies, for example Blogger, YouTube, and DoubleClick.

History
The history of Google has been detailed.

Searching
Brin and Page published their article, "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine", in 1998. Their patent for PageRank was filed in 1998 and issued in 2001.

Advertising
Their patent for AdSense was filed in 2003 and issued in 2006. Yahoo had a lawsuit against Google for patent infringement that resulted in Yahoo licensing to Google US Patent 6269361  and other patents. Over 40 patents related to advertising have been assigned to Google.

Controversies
The Google Book Search Library Project, in which millions of books from libraries will be scanned and made searchable on the Web, has led to controversy and legal action. In support of Google's mission to "organize the world's information," the Google Book Search program is designed to digitize printed book content so that it may be searched and retrieved via Google's search engine. The program has two facets—one that involves publishers, which has not been controversial, and one that involves libraries, which has. The University of Michigan has committed to allowing Google to scan its entire print and journal collection. Publishers are suing Google for copyright infringement, while Google claims their use falls under the fair use privilege of the Copyright Act.

Google has agreed to censor results for queries made from China. Google has decided to do so to stop China from hindering Chinese user searches (blocking Google or substantially slowing down the result display). Google has agreed to block content that the Chinese government deems unacceptable. .

Google Reader now automatically allows contacts a person has in a Gmail account to what feeds are subscribed. .

Google cookies are criticized by the World Privacy Forum and others. They expire automatically after two years, but cookies will not be erased unless a person does not visit any Google sites for two years. .