Even if you forget the whole "where does the money come from?" angle, they're still an ad company: their flagship products are AdWords and AdSense.
OK, to be fair, search is still very important too (in fact the most important content provider for their ad business). So call them a "search and advertising company".
They use machine learning and are actively researching it, but that's true of a lot of companies. Is IBM an AI company?
At Google, AI does seem to unite almost everything they do, from search, image recognition, self-driving cars, and ad placement. Of course all their revenue is from ads, so in revenue, they're an advertising company, but in products, they're an AI company.
I'm not saying they don't do AI, I'm just saying it's not their unique focus that sets them apart from other companies. Search-and-ads sets them apart.
You could certainly identify very large datacenters, Big Data and now machine learning as tools that Google have pioneered. But they don't have an exclusive lock on those.
No, but I think Google goes a lot further with their research and application of AI than Facebook and Amazon. I don't see Facebook and Amazon developing self-driving cars or Deep Dreaming.
but serving appropriate ads can be well served by AI. There may be a question of the increased margin that can come from keyword-based to AI-based ads, but it is there.
OK, to be fair, search is still very important too (in fact the most important content provider for their ad business). So call them a "search and advertising company".
They use machine learning and are actively researching it, but that's true of a lot of companies. Is IBM an AI company?