Learn Your Alphabet

Google, child of parent company Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL, Nasdaq: GOOG), controls more than 70 percent of the desktop search market worldwide, and more than 90 percent of mobile searches. (It’s true — Google it!) It boasts seven products with at least 1 billion monthly users each: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, YouTube, Google Play and Android. Google entered the cloud-computing game late, but it has made impressive gains. On the company’s most recent earnings conference call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud was “already a billion-dollar-per-quarter business,” as well as “the fastest-growing major public cloud provider in the world.” Most of Alphabet’s revenue comes from online advertising, but it’s a pioneer in the artificial intelligence technique of deep learning, and it’s also home to a number of “moonshots.” Those include Waymo, the company’s self-driving division that’s set to launch a driverless ridehailing service later this year. Other potential growth drivers include the subsidiary Verily that’s working on projects such as smart contact lenses that detect blood glucose levels, while subsidiary Calico aims to increase the human life span. With Alphabet’s unparalleled control of search and promising position in many other businesses, investors might want to buy and hold Alphabet for decades. (Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and has recommended Alphabet.)