Silicon Valley's theoretical-lawsuit-friendly version of Google.
It's interesting to me that a lot of shows do this, and I'm not sure why. Silicon Valley has Hooli. Veep has Clovis. Person of Interest had "Fetch and Retrieve", which honestly guys are you even trying. None of these shows seems to shy away from portraying other large tech companies, and it's trivially obvious even to someone nowhere near the industry what these ciphers are supposed to represent. I don't know of a case where anyone has actually gotten sued over depicting an actual company. So I'm not sure whether these "not really Google but yeah totally Google" companies are meant to defend against that threat, or exist for some other reason of which I'm not aware.
It doesn't exactly fit Google - there are definitely several products that are a Google thing, but many other aspects that diverge. I think not naming them has multiple benefits. 1) Less likely to get sued, 2) They want to be able to diverge where it makes sense for the story, 3) They don't want to distract viewers with the real companies (since people have preconceived notions and might be pulled out of the story if it's inconsistent).
In fact, I think I remember at least one episode where Hooli mentions Google, so in this universe, it's a new company.
It's a new company but it's a caricature of Google or Alphabet and Alphabet has a link to Hooli hidden on their page source https://abc.xyz/ as if they acknowledge it or as a joke.
I think it lets them mock all large tech companies in general without being tied down to mocking a single company. Outwardly, Hooli is Google, but also Yahoo, but some of the internal workings might not match either of them and align more with other companies. If they used Google instead, then they have to have a Larry Page character instead of Gavin Belson, and then they're tied down to mocking the real Larry Page, instead of tech CEOs in general. Gavin Belsen is much funnier than a fictional Larry Page could be. I'm pretty sure he's never killed an elephant, and it wouldn't be funny if they had a Larry Page character do that. The Nucleus plotline wouldn't make any sense. The list goes on.
Strange, I always thought of Hooli as Yahoo, but that might be because I know a lot of programmers who used to work at Yahoo and have heard the dysfunctions first hand over beer more.
I think that's the point. Hooli is a stand-in for any large tech company, and I don't think they mean to specifically single out google.
Sure, "Hooli search" and "Hooli phone" seems like a dead ringer for Google, but then I could easily point to the whole Nucleus thing and say "well duh, it's Dropbox!" Or I could look at Gavin Belson's extremely cut-throat persona and say "well duh, it's Amazon/Apple!"
I think the show does a pretty good job of not singling out any particular large tech company, but all of them in aggregate.
I think in Hollywood it's less "fear of getting sued" and more "You don't pay, you don't play" and Google (and Apple—look how many instances of Macbook-with-a-sticker-over-the-logo you see) won't pay for product-placement.
There are various reasons. Firstly why give a public company free advertising? Then there's the opposite problem, when a company may demand a license fee for displaying their product in a show. Then there's legal issues such as accidentally portraying Google in a negative light and getting sued. Why bother with the hassle when you can make up your own company?
