Despite fierce (and growing) competition from Apple and Facebook, Google remains the defining company of the digital age, forever changing the way that we think, interact and research.

Founded by Page and Brin in 1998 and now led by Schmidt, the company - which has a mission "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" - has expanded from being just a search engine provider to offering email, video (it owns YouTube), maps, social networking and mobile technology.

Google's decision this year to stop censoring its search results in China shook the country's "Great Firewall" and struck a blow for the open web.

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