Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about it!
1.Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.
2. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
3. They changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
4. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.
5. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998.
6. The woman who rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 when they were creating Google later became the CEO of YouTube.
7. The first funding for Google was at August 1998 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He gave $100,000 even before Google was incorporated.
8. Early in 1999, while graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much time and distracting their academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of Excite’s venture capitalists, after he negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000.
9. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
10. Google’s initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004.
11. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024.
12. In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.
13. In 2000 Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.
14. In order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed, advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids and click-throughs, with bidding starting at five cents per click.
15. This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off created by Bill Gross.
16. The immense popularity of the search engine has led its fans calling themselves ‘Googlists’ as they follow ‘Googlism’, the new religion.
17. Devotees of Google have found a non-profit online organization The Church of Google, a website where they worship the search engine giant.
18. The New York Times had discussed the topic “Is Google God?” under its ‘opinion’ category
19. As of September 2013, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries.
20. In September 27 2016 celebrated its 18th birthday with animated Doodle shown on web browsers.
21. The reason for the choice of September 27 remains unclear, and a dispute with rival search engine Yahoo! Search in 2005 has been suggested as the cause.
22. On Fortune magazine’s list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012 and fourth in 2009 and 2010.
23. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world’s most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index.
24. Google has found GPA’S and test scores to be “worthless as criteria for hiring”. They have teams where 14% of their employees haven’t gone to college.
25. As of 2013, Google had 47,756 employees (in the fourth quarter, including the Motorola subsidiary), among them more than 10,000 software developers based in more than 40 offices.
26. When a Google employee dies their spouses receive half pay from the company for 10 years and their chlidren 1000 dollars per month until they turn 19.
27. If you search for “askew” in Google, the content will tilt slightly to the right.
28. Google’s corporate philosophy includes principles such as “you can make money without doing evil,” “you can be serious without a suit,” and “work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun.”
29. The fist Google Doodle was dedicated to the Burning Man festival attended by Google founders in 1998.
30. Google intends to scan all known existing unique books (which are approximately 129 million) by 2020.
31. Every day 16% of the searches that occur are ones that Google has never seen before.
32. Google hired a camel to create street view of a desert.
33. The “i’m feeling lucky” button costs Google 110 million dollars per year as it bypasses all ads.
34. Every minute 2 million searches are performed.
35. Gmail was launched on April 1rst and many people thought it was an April Fool’s prank.
36. When Gmail was introduced by Google in 2004 it offered 1GB free storage when hotmail offered during that period only 1mb!!
37. As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy often called Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google’s newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors.
38. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience until July 2012, showed that half of all new product launches in the second half of 2005 had originated from the Innovation Time Off.
39. In October 2014, according to the Interbrand ranking, Google was the second most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple) with a valuation of $107.4 billion. A Millward Brown report from the same year puts the Google brand ahead of Apple’s at #1
40. Since 2001, Google has acquired many companies, primarily small venture capital-funded firms. In facts they have been aquiring 2 companies per month.
41. In addition to the many companies Google has purchased, the company has partnered with other organizations for research, advertising, and other activities.
42. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota.
43. On August 15, 2011, Google made its largest-ever acquisition to-date when it announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion subject to approval from regulators in the United States and Europe.
44. After a few months Google sold the manufacturing operations of Motorola Mobility to Flextronics for $75 million.
45. As a part of the agreement, Flextronics will manufacture undisclosed Android and other mobile devices. On December 19, 2012, Google sold the Motorola Home business division of Motorola Mobility to Arris Group for $2.35 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction. As a part of this deal, Google acquired a 15.7% stake in Arris Group valued at $300 million.
46. As of 2014, Google Inc. owned and operated six Google Data Centers across the U.S., one in Chile, one in Finland, one in Ireland, one in Belgium, one in Singapore and one on Taiwan.
47. In 2011, the company had announced plans to build three data centers at a cost of more than $200 million in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and said they would be operational within two years. In December 2013, Google announced that it had scrapped the plan to build a data center in Hong Kong.
48. Google’s most efficient data center runs at 95 °F (35 °C) using only fresh air cooling, requiring no electrically powered air conditioning; the servers run so hot that humans cannot go near them for extended periods.
49. On August 16, 2013 Google went down for 5 minutes. In that time the global internet traffic dropped by 40%.
50. The domain googlesucks.com is owned by Google.
51. In February 2003, Google stopped showing the advertisements of Oceana, a non-profit organization protesting a major cruise ship’s sewage treatment practices. Google cited its editorial policy at the time, stating “Google does not accept advertising if the ad or site advocates against other individuals, groups, or organizations.” The policy was later changed.
52. In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on its web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized because of antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November 2008.
53. Google Watch has criticized Google’s PageRank algorithms, saying that they discriminate against new websites and favor established sites.
54. The site has also alleged that there are connections between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
55. On July 21, 2010, in response to Bing, Google updated its image search to display a streaming sequence of thumbnails that enlarge when pointed at.
56. Though web searches still appear in a batch per page format, on July 23, 2010, dictionary definitions for certain English words began appearing above the linked results for web searches.
57. In August 2016, Google announced two major changes related to its mobile search results. The first, removing the “mobile-friendly”that highlighted pages were easy to read on mobile from its mobile search results page.
58. The second, on January 10, 2017, the company will start punishing mobile pages that show intrusive interstitials when a user first opens a page and they will rank lower in its search results.
59. Google.com/Mars offers visible imagery view, infrared and elevation views of planet Mars.
60. Google.com/Wedding is a free service to plan your own wedding!
61. In 2007 and early 2008, several top executives left Google. In October 2007, former chief financial officer of YouTube Gideon Yu joined Facebook along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer. In March 2008, Sheryl Sandberg, then vice-president of global online sales and operations, began her position as chief operating officer of Facebook. At the same time, Ash ElDifrawi, formerly head of brand advertising, left to become chief marketing officer of Netshops. On April 4, 2011, Larry Page became CEO and Eric Schmidt became Executive Chairman of Google. In July 2012, Google’s first female employee, Marissa Mayer, left Google to become Yahoo!’s CEO.
62. Google Translate generates its answers by trawling through decades of comparative human translated works, such as UN documents and Harry Potter novels.
63. The Versace dress Jennifer Lopez wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards sparked the creation of Google Images.
64. Steve Jobs once called Google to tell them that the yellow gradient in the second “o” of their logo wasn’t quite right.
65. Google’s Artificial-Intelligence Bot says the purpose of living is’to live forever!
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