 prisoners' phone calls. NON-TRADITIONAL COMPETITORS: ALPHABET, APPLE, AMAZON, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, SNAPCHAT, AND MICROSOFT Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter are multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. They have each built a near monopoly in their specialty. They were each started by innovators with vision, and technology perfectly tuned to their times. Google-A Search Conglomerate that Morphed into a Multi-Function Software Company www.TechnicalPDF.com Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google Inc., met when they were PhD candidates in the computer science department at Stanford. Page was looking at how sites link to each other and Brin was looking at data mining-what information is available and how to find it. They shared a feeling that web searching needed to be improved and devised a new approach to sorting results. They took their ideas about searching for information to other search companies. However, these companies were focused on expanding into other areas such as adding functions to their portals (the first screen that people saw when they logged into the site). In contrast, Brin and Page wanted to focus on search, SO they founded their own company, Google, in 1998 and sought venture capital funding. When Google was founded, there was competition from other search engines including Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo!. However, Google's site quickly became popular solely by word of mouth with no advertising. In August 2015, Google's founder Larry Page announced the creation of holding company Alphabet. Alphabet became the vehicle whereby new technologies and startup companies were funded. Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is the cash cow of the organization. Its revenue from advertising is the driving force that enables Alphabet to underwrite new ventures such as self-driving cars. Google has two sources of revenue: licensing its search software to smartphone manufacturers and enterprises, and advertising on its search sites. Please see "Investigations into Google Search Practices" i