In this tutorial series, we'll learn about Google, but "Google" can refer to many things, so let's start by understanding what the word means.
Google, The Company
First and mainly, we have Google, the company. This is also called Google LLC. The term LLC stands for Limited Liability Company in U.S. law1.
Google LLC
https://policies.google.com/terms (accessed 2024-03-31)
organized under the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, and operating under the laws of the USA
Google's Many Google Products & Services
Google, the company, provides many services and offers many products, many of which contain the word "Google" in it. Some of Google's products are:
- Google Search: a free search engine available on
google.com, and the main subject of this tutorial series. - Google Mail: a free e-mail provider, also known as GMail due to its users having e-mail addresses such as
[email protected]. This won't be covered in this series. - Google Chrome: a free web browser (like Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.). Many modern web browsers are similar to Chrome because they all use the same code as base: a project called Chromium.
- Youtube: a free video web hosting and streaming platform. This one is just Youtube, not "Google Youtube" or "Google Videos" perhaps because it was already called Youtube before being acquired by Google in 20062.
- Google Drive: a free cloud storage service.
- Google Docs: a free suite of office web applications similar to Microsoft Office.
- Blogger: a free blog hosting platform. Users get a free
.blogspot.comsubdomain.
You may notice above that all these products are provided free of change, and you may wondering how does Google make any money then. Google mainly makes money through advertising, through ads placed on its products, and on webpages around the Internet.
By the way, every time someone says "just Google it," they're talking about searching for it using Google Search. Even though Google has several products now, nobody says "Google the file" to mean put the file in Google Drive or sent it with Google Mail. It's always Google Search.
Google: The Website
One way to search for things on Google is to go to Google's website, and to do this you need to type the following URL into the address bar of your web browser: https://www.google.com/. Doing so will bring you to Google's homepage:
Some web browsers have Google's homepage configured as the default page when you open the web browser. It's also possible to configure that manually if you want.
Google's domain name, google.com, also hosts other Google products like Google Mail, available at https://mail.google.com/.
There's also Google Images, available at https://images.google.com/, which as far as we're concerned is part of Google Search, because we will cover it in this tutorial series.
Google owns domain names in several CCTLDs. For example, in Brazil, Google's website isn't at google.com, but in google.com.br, with the .br CCTLD at the end. In the United Kingdom, there is google.co.uk, and in Portugal google.pt. All of these are official Google websites. However, Google doesn't own a domain name in every single TLD, so don't assume a website is actually an official Google website just because it starts with google.
- It seems https://www.google.com/supported_domains contains a list of supported TLDs. (accessed 2024-04-01)
The Google in Your Smartphone
If you have an Android smartphone, you may have several Google apps installed already, and even have a Google Account to access all the Google products even if you didn't realize you made one when you bought the smartphone. Even if that's not the case, there's one important thing to know about:
Apps aren't websites.
When you access a website, such as google.com, you will be accessing it through a smartphone app called a web browser, such as Google Chrome. You can also access the website in a desktop computer through a desktop app, such as also Google Chrome.
On the other hand, you may have an app in your smartphone that says "Google." Perhaps it's even a bar on your screen for you to type with a microphone icon if you want to speak. This isn't the website Google. This is the app Google. More specifically, the app isn't called simply "Google," but (most likely) Google Go3. You can't install this app on a desktop computer, it's only for smartphones, but you can access the website Google on both your desktop and smartphone, which is why the web is better for everything.
Other Google products, like Google Mail, Google Drive, Youtube, etc., also have apps. Again, these apps are not websites. So there is a website version and an app version of everything. Most of the time what works in one version works in the other, but there are cases there's functionality missing, or that works differently, so beware.
This also applies to other apps-of-websites you may find out there, such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Google in the Future
Some of the features that we will learn about in this series may change or disappear in the future. Google routinely changes how its website looks and works, for reasons beyond anybody's understanding, and sometimes features just disappear.
Sometimes the feature still works, but the button you clicked to use it is gone, and you can't find it mentioned anywhere in Google's official webpages. So I'm going to assume the only reason they didn't remove it is because nobody that works there remembers it exists either. Let's hope they don't find out about this tutorial.
Google has a very long list of defunct products. Most notably, it once tried to compete with Facebook with its own social network, confusingly named Google+ ("Google Plus"), and that included integrating Youtube into it. This failed terribly. It was particularly awkward because this happened while its own OTHER social network, Orkut, was still alive in Brazil, and, in fact, Orkut was THE most accessed website here in 2008, more accessed than even Google.com.br itself, which was 2nd place4. Orkut was integrated into Google+5 and Google+ died, so Google went from having a very successful social network in a country to having none at all.
- See also: https://killedbygoogle.com/ contains a long list of defunct Google products (accessed 2024-03-31).
Considering its history, I wouldn't be surprised if even the most basic advanced features get removed one day. Let's hope that doesn't happen in this decade so this series stays useful for some time.
Navigation
References
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/llc.asp (accessed 2024-03-31). ↩︎
- "Google closes $A2b YouTube deal" - https://www.theage.com.au/business/google-closes-a2b-youtube-deal-20061115-gdotv3.html (accessed 2024-03-31). ↩︎
- Google Go on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.searchlite (accessed 2024-03-31). ↩︎
- Alexa's ranking shows
Orkut.com.bras the 1st most visited website, aboveGoogle.com.br, which is the 2nd place - https://web.archive.org/web/20080919063630/http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=BR&ts_mode=country&lang=none (accessed 2024-03-31) ↩︎ - In Portuguese: https://tecnoblog.net/arquivo/102783/orkut-google-plus/ (2024-03-31). ↩︎
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