Happy 21st Birthday Google.
Google. A word which all know. But How well do we know about it? On 21st Birthday of Google, here are some of the most interesting facts about google that we all should know.
1. The word ‘Google’ is a slanged derivation of mathematical term ‘googol’. Googol is basically 1 followed by 100 zeros. Which means 1 Googol = 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
2. Founders wanted the name ‘Google’ to hint at the seemingly infinite amount of data which the two founders wanted their fledgeling search engine to mine, make sense of and deliver to the world. However, many people believed that the world Google is a misspelling of ‘Googol’.
3. In 1995, Larry (Lawrence) Page was 22 at the time when he earned a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan, considers attending Stanford University for his PhD Sergey Brin, 21 was already a PhD candidate there as was assigned to show around campus to Page. It was their first and quite momentous meeting of the two geniuses.
4. Starting in September 1998, Google’s first office was a rented garage owned by Susan Wojcicki on Santa Margarita Ave in Menlo Park, Calif. Wojcicki is Google’s employee number 16, Google’s first marketing manager and is currently CEO of YouTube.
5. Google was originally named as ‘Backrub’ by Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
6. Google’s ‘I am Feeling Lucky’ button was removed after ‘Google Instant’ arrived. The button used to cost ‘$110 million every year’ to the company as it would bypass all ads and take the user to top search immediately. ‘Google Instant’, on the other hand, starts searching for whatever you type as soon as you type it.
7. Google bought YouTube in the year 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. As per a study, Google has acquired so many companies since 2010, that it has been acquiring an average of one company every week. Android, YouTube, Waze. You just name it, Google owns it.
8. The first-ever Google Doodle was a Burning Man stick figure that came out on August 30, 1998. Larry and Sergey attended the Burning Man Festival in Nevada and that’s where they got the idea about it. It was added to the homepage as a message to let users know that the founders were out of the office and won’t be able to fix technical issues like a server crash.
9. Google’s Co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin has private planes & have private runways in NASA. The runways are not allowed for landing or take-off purposes for any other planes.
10. Google owns common misspellings of its own name as well. It includes www.gooogle.com, www.gogle.com, and and much more. This has been sought as a way to redirect people to the original Google page in case people make a typo in their browsers.
11. The first-ever Google computer storage was built with Lego pieces consisting of ten of 4GB hard-drives. It is still saved till date and displayed in Stanford University.
12. Google is very dedicated to the staff and employee welfare. The employees working for Google in the US have a death benefit policy where the surviving spouse of the deceased employee will receive 50% of their salary every year for the next decade guaranteed.
Every person who works in Google is known as Googler.
13. Google knows how to keep employees happy. As per one of its policies, no google office is allowed to be more than 150 feet far from a food corner or a cafeteria.
14. Google helps you pronounce massive numbers. All you have to do is type a number in the search bar followed by “=english”. Google will suggest how to pronounce or spell the number in words. Try it. Poor thing is, it only knows up to billions.
15. There is a rotated version of Google known as ‘Google Mirror’. All you need to do is type ‘good’ in the browser or click https://elgoog.im/ and you can operate a mirror version of google which shows everything in a mirrored avatar. As stupid, funny & pointless as this may sound, but it helped in circumventing the Great Firewall in China that banned Google.
16. The founders of Google wanted to sell it to an online company Excite in 1999 merely for $1 million. However, Excite’s CEO rejected the offer. Currently, Google holds a worth of more than $300 billion. We are thankful that the founders carried on the business as they are doing better than anyone would ever have. But yeah, the Excite CEO will have a good chunk of regrets.
17. Google image search was in 2001. From day one it rolled out with a whopping 250 million images for users to search from. The launch was in a big way as 250 million is not bad for day-1.
18. When Google went public, it was valued as much as General Motors. Its shares were sold at $85 per share and the company valued at $27 billion with 19,605,052 shares stock sales. Many Google employees became instant millionaires when Google went public in 2014.
19. Over 1 billion search requests every day are handled by Google. This is done by using more than 1 million computers. It is estimated that Google processes around 20 petabytes or 20,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information daily.
20. Google has the world’s largest network of translators, enabling users to translate 345 different languages into each other.
21. Google Maps calculates traffic by tracking how fast Android devices are moving on the road. Further, The Google Street View has more than 28 million miles of photographed roads till now.
