Google is an American multinational company best known for its search engine and other services such as Gmail, YouTube, Android, Google Maps, and Google Chrome. It was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin who met as Ph.D students at Stanford University. Google began as a research project and has since expanded to offer over 150 products and services including the Android mobile operating system, YouTube video sharing platform, Gmail email service, Google Maps, Street View, and the Google Chrome web browser.