What’s the Difference between Google and Google Chrome?

Google is everywhere, in all kinds of software.
If you didn’t follow their development since the beginning, you can be lost, it’s easy to get lost with all the new software they offer.

Google is the name of a giant tech company, and also the name of the most popular search engine online (Google Search).
Google Chrome is the web browser, a software used to go on the Internet, like Firefox or Internet Explorer.

In this post I’ll get back on Google, their story and origins, but also on the company products, like Google Chrome.

Google: the company

Origins

Google was created in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
At the beginning, the goal was to create an Internet search engine tool.

They were not the first ones in the world to think about that.
For example, Altavista was already there.
But Google wanted to be different, I’ll talk about that just after.

The company name, “Google”, comes from the Gogol number (10^100).
They have announced that they can manage tons of information, by processing and categorizing it.

Evolution

The search engine development was fast.
Less than one year after they started in the Larry Page’s room, they already received 3 million pages views every day on the search engine’s website.

In 2000, Google announced they indexed more than one billion web pages
They already became the biggest search engine in the world, only 2 years after the official start.

Then, Google never stopped to index more pages, add new languages and new features (like the image search engine).

The search engine today

Google is no longer giving us statistics, but we have no doubt they are in an absolute monopoly situation.
None of the search engine competitors can compete with them until now.
Even the giant Microsoft that give a try with Bing, seems to be far behind
And it’s increasingly difficult to compete with Google, people are now used to searching with Google, they don’t want to try anything else.

The latest figures published said that something like 30,000 billion documents were indexed by Google, and they now answer to more than 3.5 billions search requests each day.
These figures are probably even bigger now, because of the smartphone’s growth during the period just after.

Google Chrome and other products from Google

Alphabet

In August 2015, Google created the Alphabet company, to regroup their multiples activities within a same entity.
This could become easier for us, we could have made the difference between:

• Alphabet: the main company
• Google: the search engine
• Google Chrome: a product from the Alphabet company

But in reality, they didn’t do this, it’s a bit more complicated.
If you remember my version it’s already a good thing, but they have bigger ambitions, so they added intermediary layers.

The Alphabet company is in fact a conglomerate, with subsidiaries, each one in a specific field.
Google is an Alphabet subsidiary, with the goal to develop the search engine, Gmail and other web products.

Google Chrome

As you probably understood, Google Chrome is one of this web products, created and managed by Google.

Google Chrome is a web browser.
Like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, it allows you to browse any website on the Internet.

You may mix both because when you start Google Chrome, you see the Google website, the search engine.
That’s why there are many people who use the wrong word.

Other products

Google is the inventor or the current owner of many other products that you probably know with different names:

• YouTube: probably the most known. They bought it in 2006, and they have now over 2 billion users each month
• Gmail: one of the most popular email provider in the world, with over 2 billion users in the world
• Google Docs: Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. are a direct competitor to Microsoft Office. It’s free and available online on any device.
• Android: If you don’t have an iPhone, you are using Android on your smartphone. It’s the operating system for almost all smartphones in the world (except Apple products)

That’s it for the main Google products you probably know, but they have a lot more.

Google is now a more diversified company, that work not only on software.
They currently work on various innovative projects over the world, with almost no link to their main products.
For example:

• Internet provider for not covered areas
• Autonomous cars
• Drones
• Personal assistant (Google Home)
• etc.

This diversification leads to the Alphabet creation in 2015, to create distinct subsidiaries for these projects.

Conclusion

You should know after the reading of this post the difference between Google and Google Chrome.
Google is primarily the search engine, but also the company that develops many things for the web, like YouTube and Google Maps.
Google Chrome is only one of these products, a web browser.