Attendees included Apple Inc’s Tim Cook, Facebook Inc’s Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla Motors Inc’s Elon Musk.

In a stunning announcement, Eric Schmidt, head of Alphabet, Inc., the holding company that owns Google, said today in a press conference at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, that at midnight on New Year's Eve of this year, the iconic Google search engine will become property of a new nonprofit organization called Unlimited Years of Search, or UYS.