Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.

In the back half of 2015, Google split itself up. There’s still the Google that makes the search engine, ads, and Android. But a bunch of “other stuff” got spun out into a new parent company, Alphabet. And it was very, very confusing.

So 2016 was always going to be about a couple of core questions: would Alphabet make sense, and would Google get more “Googley” under its new CEO, Sundar Pichai? The answers to those questions turned out to not be a simple yes or no. Instead, we have had to rethink what these companies are, and where they’re going.

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