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Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Amit Patel and supported by Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.


Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as the Gmail email service, the Google Docs office suite, and the Google+ social networking service. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the Google Chrome web browser, the Picasa photo organizing and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system, found on specialized laptops called Chromebooks.