Deliver the most relevant and reliable information available

To help you find what you're looking for, we consider many factors, including the words in your question, the content of pages, the expertise of sources, and your language and location. Every day, fifteen percent of searches are ones we haven't seen before, so we use automated systems to get you the most relevant and reliable information we can find.

To measure whether people continue to find our results relevant and reliable, we have a rigorous process that involves extensive testing and thousands of independent people around the world who rate the quality of Search.

Maximize access to information

Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That's why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources. Some information is purely factual, like the height of the Eiffel Tower. For more complex topics, Search is a tool to explore many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world.

To keep information openly accessible, we only remove content from our search results in limited circumstances, such as compliance with local laws or site owner requests.

Present information in the most useful way

Today, information has expanded beyond just web pages to include images, videos, news, sports scores, and many other types of content. So if you’re searching for directions, we show a map. Or when you’re looking for the weather or stock prices, we show the most up-to-the-minute information. We use approachable language and design to guide you through your experience on Search, and test our approach broadly to make sure we’re presenting information in the most useful way.

Protect your privacy

When you use our products you trust us with your data, and it’s our responsibility to keep your data private, safe, and secure. That’s why we build controls so you can choose the privacy settings that are right for you or even permanently delete your data. To keep your data secure, we’ve built some of the most advanced security infrastructure in the world. And we'll never sell your personal information to anyone. We make money from advertising, not by selling personal information.

Guided by our privacy principles, we create tools and explanations to help you understand how we use data to make Search more helpful to you. For example, using your search history, Google can autocomplete your searches. So if you start to search for "barcelona", we might suggest past places or sights you searched for before you've even finished typing them.

Sell ads, nothing more

Ads are how Search remains free and accessible to everyone. But ads are the only thing we sell.

We don’t charge anyone to appear in our search index. Whether a business, individual or organization buys ads is not a factor in our search algorithms. We never provide special treatment to advertisers in how our search algorithms rank their websites, and nobody can pay us to do so.

Ads are only displayed if we believe they’re relevant to the search terms you entered. For most searches, we show no ads at all. When we do show ads, they’re always labeled so you can tell them apart from search results.

Help creators succeed online

To support a healthy web of fresh and useful content in all the world’s languages, we help people, publishers, and businesses of all sizes succeed online and be found by others. We do this by sending visitors to websites small and large through our search results, and by providing tools and resources to help site owners be successful.