Happy birthday Google!
Do you think two grad school students in 1998 ever dreamed of creating software that could provide answers to 40,000 different questions every second?! 19 years ago when France was winning the world cup, General Motors were striking for seven weeks, Afghanistan was having an earthquake, Bill Clinton was being impeached, the first successful MP3 was being invented and Hong Kong was opening the world's largest airport, Google began its ambiguous task of 'organizing the internet'.
The 'garage to googleplex' story is an astonishing one and no doubt one we can all learn something from. Believe it or not, when Larry and Sergey first met, they disagreed on nearly everything. So if you feel you can never agree with your colleagues - you could make a Google yet! However, a friendly partnership was formed and after 19 years, we have a search engine that conducts 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Here's 20 interesting facts on the finer points of this great company!
- Larry and Sergey first named their new search engine 'Backrub'. This was later changed to the Google we know now after a brainstorming session when a fellow graduate student suggested the word googolplex (the name for 10 to the power of googol) or: 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. That’s 1 plus 100 zeros.
2. Google has a pet T-rex, named Stan, who lives at their California headquarters. Founders bought it to remind the employees to not let Google go extinct!
3. Google has 60,000 employees in 50 different countries who are all encouraged to spend 20% of their time on their own projects - for example Google news.
4. On average, Google has acquired more than one company per week since 2010.
5. Google HQ hires goats. They don't do any programming but they mow their lawns and fields. The employees think it’s a lot cuter to watch goats do the mowing than lawn mowers.
6. The company’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil.”
7. Google obeys user commands such as 'do a barrel roll', 'askew' and 'anagram' when typed into the search bar
8. Google allow employee's dogs to roam the offices freely and hence have a 'dog policy' in their handbook - one of the rules being 'Dogs are not allowed in bathrooms, break areas, the cafe, in meetings, or on the sand volleyball court.'
9. Food is so important to employees at Google that founders Page and Brin instilled a rule that no Googler can be more than 100 feet away from food. As a result there are 25 cafes at Google's Californian headquarters, the Mountain View Googleplex, and a total of 85 cafes at Google campuses across the globe.
10. You can see what people are currently googling here
11. As employees are called Googlers, new employees are called Nooglers and ex-employeers Xooglers! (For their first week, Nooglers have to wear a rainbow hat with a propeller on the top and the word Noogler embroidered across it).
12. Google spent around $9.8 billion on R&D in 2012!
13. The first Google Doodle was an out-of-office message in 1998 when Brin and Page were traveling to Nevada to attend the Burning Man festival. The doodle was a man standing behind the second O. They wanted users to know they wouldn’t be available to fix tech issues.
14. One of the early versions of Google could process 30-50 pages per second.Now Google can process millions of pages per second.
15. The CFO at Google earns $650,000.
16. Google was first stored on ten 4 GB hard drives in a Lego casing, now showcased by Stanford University. The Lego design would let the founders expand storage capacity easily. The index now has over 100 million GB of data.
17. If a US Google employee passes away while under the employ of the 19-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive 50% of their salary every year for the next decade.
18. ”Google” was added as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006.
19. Street View has about 28 million miles of photographed roads.
20. Since the Google founders weren’t looking to start their own business, they tried to sell their search engine system. Yahoo originally said no, but in 2002 offered to buy Google for $3 billion. Google said no, and it’s now valued at $400 billion.
Did any of these surprise you? Add your own findings and share the knowledge!