In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM. On September 24, 2012, Google launched Google for Entrepreneurs, a largely not-for-profit business incubator providing startups with co-working spaces known as Campuses, with assistance to startup founders that may include workshops, conferences, and mentorships. A job search product has also existed since before 2017, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and career sites. Google had previously used virtual assistants and chatbots, such as Google Bard, prior to the announcement of Gemini in March 2024.
Related platforms
While any user can upload custom emoji to the platform, the use of custom emoji in chats is only available to users with Telegram Premium. Users can freely join public chats and find them using the in-app search function, while private chats require an invitation. Both in Secret and regular chats, messages can self-destruct after they are read, disappearing for all parties after a period set by the user, ranging from 1 day to 1 year. Users can however import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk due to data portability, either making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one.
Following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling behind in the AI race, Google’s senior management issued a “code red” and a “directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months”. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. It would not remove content that is “broadly useful”, such as news articles, or already part of the public record. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google’s capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.
Following the launch of Stars, Telegram released several updates to their functionality, such as allowing Stars to be used to unlock media in channels or to buy gifts for other users. For users who signed in from the European Economic Area (EEA) or United Kingdom, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are supported by storing data only on servers in the Netherlands, and designating a London-based company as their responsible data controller. In December 2020, Telegram launched a Bugs and Suggestions platform, where users can submit bug reports and suggestion cards for new features.
Telegram Messenger
Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States. Google’s other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind). Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet.
- Google provided anonymized location data from devices in the area, which raised privacy concerns due to the potential inclusion of unrelated protesters.
- The ban applied to non-U.S.-based purchasers as well, because Telegram could not prevent the re-sale of Grams to U.S. citizens on a secondary market, as the anonymity of users was one of the key features of TON.
- Changing the phone number in the app will automatically reassign the user’s account to that number without the need to export data or notify their contacts.
- Google’s services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef’s “Bork bork bork”, Pig Latin, “Hacker” or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine.
Bot abuse
Industry reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. Google Ads allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through a cost-per-click scheme. In 2007, Google launched “AdSense for Mobile”, taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.
How do I make Chrome my default browser?
The company also actively funds and profits from climate disinformation by monetizing ad spaces on most of the largest climate disinformation sites. Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In 2023 Google consumed 24 TWh of electricity, more than countries such as Iceland, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, or Tunisia. In October 2020, the company pledged to make the packaging for its hardware products 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable by 2025.
- In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet.
- In July 2021, researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London and ETH Zurich published an analysis of the MTProto protocol, concluding that the protocol could provide a “confidential and integrity-protected channel” for communication.
- Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
- In June 2017, Pavel Durov in an interview said that U.S. intelligence agencies tried to bribe the company’s developers to weaken Telegram’s encryption or install a backdoor during their visit to the U.S. in 2016.
- From then on, the Neptun code and the new password can be used to access university systems including the E-learning system, outlook account and Wi-Fi.
However, according to Pavel, Telegram has disclosed data for 203 legal requests from the Brazilian government from Q1 to Q3 of 2024, and a total of 6,992 legal requests from India, its largest market, during the same period. Its data centers are spread across a complex corporate structure of shell companies in various jurisdictions to avoid compliance with government subpoenas. Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021, with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021.
In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called “Project Bernanke” that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services. In January 2021, the Australian Government proposed legislation that would require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their content. This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets. On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia.
Examples of platforms providing Telegram bot integration include respond.io, Manychat and Trengo. These platforms also enable businesses to add Telegram chat widget to their websites and gives them the option to automate conversations or let human agents reply. Bots are also commonly used for businesses to communicate with customers as the bot APIs integrate with communication platforms so that Telegram messages can be sent and received in an omnichannelinbox. In April 2021, the Payments 2.0 upgrade enabled bot payments within any chat, using third-party services such as Sberbank, Tranzoo, Payme, CLICK, LiqPay and ECOMMPAY to process the credit card information.
arrest of Pavel Durov
People can use Internet Of Things (IoT) services with two-way interaction via IFTTT implemented within Telegram. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages. To activate an inline bot, a user must type the bot’s username and a query in the message field. The Dutch website Tweakers reported that an invited bot can potentially read all group messages, when the bot controller changes the access settings silently at a later point in time.
Privacy and security features
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.
The NDR stated that they had not noticed these ads before, but closed the channel, stating that an advertisement-based accumulation of Toncoin, albeit unsolicited and not withdrawn, was unacceptable for a German public media broadcaster. A few days later, following repeated criticism, the same judge suspended his order until the police issue a report on the consequences that this measure would have for users. Scammers employ a variety of confidence tricks to entice users into completing “prepaid tasks” in which users deposit money into scammers’ accounts with the expectation of receiving high returns. However, deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov denied any data from the app being leaked. It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Diia application.
In the same year, Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content. Telegram responded to the BBC’s reporting, stating that Telegram “proactively moderates harmful content on its platform including child abuse material”, and that its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving”. British far-right publication TR.news, following multiple deplatformings, launched a Telegram channel to spread its posts and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that Irish far-right groups grew substantially between 2019 and 2020.
Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. The outage, attributed to a cloud service error and not a cyberattack, prompted a joint apology from UniSuper and Google Cloud executives, who assured members that no personal data was compromised and restoration efforts were underway. On September 14, 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion (£3.5 billion) fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google’s search and web browser apps. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google’s constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. This comes alongside other large fines against social media companies accused of hosting content critical of the Kremlin or supportive of Ukraine.
The company’s founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app’s role in fighting censorship in Russia. In September 2021, a Russian researcher published details about a bug with the self-destruct feature that allowed the user to recover deleted photos from their own device. All pin up online casino issues were patched before the paper’s publication with a security bounty paid out to the researchers. They also found that attackers had the theoretical ability to reorder messages coming from the client to the server though the attacker would not be able to see the content of the messages.
In April 2025, Telegram launched secure group calls with end-to-end encryption by using blockchain-like encryption technology. According to Telegram, there is a neural network working to learn various technical parameters about a call to provide better quality of service for future uses. In December 2019, Bloomberg News moved their messenger-based newsletter service from WhatsApp to Telegram after the former banned bulk and automated messaging. Channels offer detailed statistics on view counts, user growth and interactions, also visible only to admins. Channels are one-way feeds where the channel owner or admins can post content while followers can only read, react and comment, if comments have been enabled.
TopLive – Live Video Chat App
Telegram stated that it does not have access to the data, while the platform will share the information only with the authorized recipient. It asks users to upload their own official documents such as passport, identity card, driver license, etc. The gateway sends users’ Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users’ phone number remains hidden. When an author adds links to YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter, the service allows you to embed their content directly in the article. In July 2025, Telegram partnered with the rapper and media figure Snoop Dogg to release a set of limited edition collectible gifts alongside his music video “Gifts”. These collectible gifts are registered on the TON blockchain as a form of NFT and can then be traded or sold both on the Telegram platform via the in-app Gift Marketplace or via outside platforms and marketplaces.
Ads from Telegram’s “Sponsored Messages” platform began to appear in channels with more than 1000 followers in October 2021. Telegram has stated that the company will never serve advertisements in private chats. Such bots are used, among other things, to emulate and play old games in the app and inform users about vaccine availability for COVID-19.