Beyond the Syllabus: 15 Facts you did not know about Google

The search engine on everyone’s minds – Google was the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both PhD students from Stanford University. Google was established as a research project by the duo in January 1996.

 I fondly refer to this super search engine as – Google Baba because I feel it has answers to all my queries. But did you know that this search engine was named “BlackRub” during its testing phase and after a lot of thought the makers thought of naming it – Googol, a term coined basically because it equaled to a number which comes up to 10 followed by 100 zeroes. So, why did the name change again? Err… actually it was a spelling mistake. Yes, you read that right, Sean ­Anderson a friend of Larry Page was helping him shortlist a name for his venture and made a typo while searching in the Internet domain name registry database to check if “Googol” was still available for registration and use. Well, this is the story that led to the establishment of this $160 billion company.   

As of today, Google is not only famous as ‘The’ search engine but has spread its wings by offering email, (Gmail), an office suite (Google Docs), a cloud storage service (Google Drive), social networking service (Google+) as well as development of the Android mobile operating system, browser-only Chrome OS for a netbook known as a Chromebook.

Google was established with a mission to organise all the information of the world. And most of you would not know that its unofficial slogan earlier was – Don't be evil.

For more such fun facts about the best search engine till date, read on.

Google Storage was initially made from LEGO

So, back when Google was called BackRub, the search engine possessed storage of 40 GB and was housed in a fort made of LEGO. Sources share that LEGO was used because the makers felt the need for an easily expandable cover which could easily house 10 hard drives with 4 GB storage space each.

Another interesting fact is that the bricks used to design this storage cover have the same hues as that of the present day logo of Google. Was it a coincidence? Well, we don’t know for certain.

 

First tweet of Google

Considered geeky by many, the first twitter post by Google was posted on February 2009 and it was-

I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.

For people like me who don’t understand binary code, this tweet meant – I am feeling lucky.

Google’s search

Every time you type in a query at Google, the search engine takes over 200 factors into account before it delivers you with the most relevant results and the time it takes to do all this is a fraction of a second.

Domain Names

Google as a company owns many domain names which are the common misspellings of the word – Google. Some of these domain names are Gogle.com, Gooogle.com, Googlr.com, 466453.com etc.

Google Searches

Every second more than two million searches are conducted on Google.

Google Homepage

Have you ever noticed how empty the Google homepage is? Well, the first thought that comes to mind is that this may have been the case to decrease the load time of the website. However, the truth is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not know HTML and did not even have a webmaster to help them and so the homepage was designed such that it used minimum amount of HTML code.

Google’s Revenue

In 2013, Google earned revenue of $55.5 billion and 91% of it came from advertising.

Google’s Search Index

Google's search index is more than 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.

Google Employees

Employees at Google are called Googlers, and new employees at Google are called Nooglers.

Employee Encouragement

Employees at Google are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on developing their own projects. Google News as well as Orkut are examples of projects that grew from this working model at Google.

First Doodle

Are you a fan of the Google Doodles like me? Well, then it would be of great interest to know that the first Doodle was made by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in August 1998. And the duo designed this Doodle to communicate that they would be “out of office”.

Brin and Page, in 1998, were taking a weekend off to go for Nevada’s Burning Man festival and they used its logo as a Doodle on Google’s homepage to inform their users that they would not be in office and thus, would not be available to fix technical issues such as a server crash.

Street View Maps

A total of 5 million miles of roads have been photographed by Google for its Street View maps feature.  

Youtube

Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. That is almost an hour for every person on Earth.

Acquisition

Google is known to acquire many companies. In 2014 (till August end), Google acquired 27 companies.

Animal Friendly

Another interesting fact about Google is that it is an extremely animal friendly company. The proof of this statement lies in the fact that Google rents goats. Yes! You read that right. Google rents goats from a firm called California Grazing to ensure that the Google headquarters remains well maintained and the company very aptly states that goats are – “A lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers”.

Also, Google’s Code of Conduct states, “Google's affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out”. The firm proudly names its company dogs and one such friendly dog is Yoshka who frequently accompanies senior VP operations, Urs Holzle to the Googleplex. In general, staff members are allowed to bring their friendly, well-behaved pets to work at Google.

Enhance your knowledge! Read our "Beyond the Syllabus" series.

- 30 Facts you did not know about the Earth

- 30 Amazing facts about your brain

- Who got there first - the deepest, highest and farthest places on Earth

- 10 least explored areas on Earth

- 5 unsolved mysteries of India

- Unsolved mysteries of the world

- Six engineering marvels in India

- 5 famous people who disappeared mysteriously

- YouTube channels to sound smarter Part 1

- YouTube channels to sound smarter Part 2