Inside Alphabet: why Google rebranded itself and what happens next

As Larry Page once told staff, technology is revolutionary, not evolutionary, and Google's surprise move has experts speculating there are more changes to come

Every month a hundred billion searches run through Google - a repository of the world's curiosity, hopes, dreams and fears. Google has been a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2006, it is valued at $445bn and last year had revenues of $66bn. But as its billionaire founders have made clear, none of this is enough.

In a stunning move on Monday night, Google rebranded itself Alphabet. The new company will be a holding company whose largest asset will be Google the search firm. But founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made clear that while G is for Google, it would be just one of the letters in its portfolio.