Google Surpasses Amazon To Become 3rd Most Valuable US Company

(RTTNews) - Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, GOOG), the parent company of search giant Google, has surpassed retail giant Amazon Inc. (AMZN) on a market-capitalization basis.

Last Friday, Amazon closed at $1.616 trillion at the bell, Google's market capitalization was $1.622 trillion. This makes Alphabet the third most valuable company in the US market after Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). While Amazon is $1.613 trillion at the bell, Google's market capitalization is $1.632 trillion as of Monday.

Apple leads the way with $2.101 trillion, followed by Microsoft's at $1.912 trillion, with the Windows maker set to become the second US company after Apple to breach the $2-trillion mark.

This is the first time Alphabet has managed to surpass Amazon on a market cap basis in 16 months.

Created in 2015, Alphabet is essentially a holding company for Google, which generates most of its revenue and profit. Although Google has invested in different areas of technology, including mobile phones, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and health technology, its key money-generating business continues to be online advertising, driven by its dominance in the search industry.

For the recent first quarter, the company reported revenue growth of 34 percent to $55.31 billion, of which advertising revenues were $44.68 billion. Google has been the market leader in online advertising for well over a decade.

Moving ahead, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company will continue to focus on search engines. "[For] me, our ultimate moonshot is still Search. I know people would be surprised to hear that 20 years in. Search works very well, but because I'm working on Search, I see all the limitations. Even today, when people type in a complex query, we're looking at keywords trying to match it. We still have a long way to go to actually understand what the user's intent is, the context, where they are coming from, and giving the best answer. So that is still the moonshot," Pichai told Yahoo Finance in an exclusive interview.