curious to know more about the biggest tech giant? here are 40 lesser known facts about google!
google is indeed an inseparable part of everyone's life today. let's accept that we all are curious to know interesting things about the company, which has brought big things like, google search and android. so, we bring to you 40 interesting facts to bring you closer to 'our favourite' google!
1. the google guys, larry page and sergey brin, met first in 1995 at stanford university when sergey was asked to show larry around the school. google was first created as a private company on 4 september, 1998, and its first initial public offering was held on 19 august, 2004.
2. a google employee is termed as a googler, while they like to call a new employee “noogler.”
3. based on alexa, google is the internet’s most used website globally.
4. google aims to organise the world’s information and “make it universally accessible and useful.”
5.the earlier version of google which was developed at stanford could only analyse 30-50 pages a second. today, the count has increased to millions of pages per second.
6. google was sued by a former google sales executive, christina elwell, on the grounds of job discrimination, when she was pregnant with quadruplets. the court granted google's request to move the case to arbitration rather than to a public trial.
7. creators page and brin thought if of naming google as "what box." however, brin thought that it sounded similar to "wet box," which sounds like some kind of porn.
8. critics opine that the internet might still be in its pre-hellenistic age sans google.
9. during the egyptian crisis in 2011-2012, google launched its special service, which allowed people with no internet to send tweets by dialing a phone number and dropping a voicemail. the voicemail was automatically translated as messages on twitter.
10. facebook users spend the most minutes on the internet, with over 250 billion minutes in a month. this data is for the month of may 2011. microsoft and google came in second and third with 204 billion and 200 billion minutes, respectively.
11. a fellow graduate sean anderson asked page and brin to name their site as 'googolplex'. page thought they should shorten it to 'googol,' which means number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. anderson mistyped 'googol' as 'google,' which was an available name. the name reflects google’s mission to organise the massive amounts of information on the web.
12. google ceo eric schmidt got into controversy when he told google users that the future of the web is headed towards complete transparency and no anonymity. he said that if google looked at a person’s messaging and a person’s location, it could predict where a person will go. additionally, according to schmidt, if a person has just 14 photos on the internet, google could accurately identify the person.
13. schmidt raised eyebrows when in a 2011 interview, he said that he doesn’t think people want google to answer their questions, rather they want google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”
14. google is criticised by its competitors that it manipulates its search results, it uses others’ intellectual properties, it consumes big amount of computer energy, and for monopoly, antitrust, and restraint of trade issues. the company is also criticised for promoting sexism and ageism.
15. google has on-campus daycare centers for the children of the employees. these are based on a philosophy called reggio emilia, which is a self-directed learning program. in 2008, the company realised that they are spending $37,000 on each child per year, where as getting a phd in computer science at stanford costs $34,000 a year.
16. google has reduced its tax rates by billions of dollars by intelligently taking advantage of offshore tax havens such as ireland and bermuda. top corporate income tax in the u.s. is 35 per cent. where as in ireland, it's only 12.5 per cent, and in bermuda it’s zero.
17. google inc.’s first employee was craig silverstein, a fellow computer science graduate student at stanford. he was hired september 1998. he currently serves as director of technology at google.
18. google was originated at the stanford school of engineering with an attempt to catalog and analyse the world wide web. the process first ran at stanford with the user name “google.stanford.edu.”
19. google, on an estimate, generates approximately 20 petabytes of user-generated data every day. 1 petabyte is approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
20. google hires goats to eat brush and reduce fire hazard in fields at their california mountain view headquarters.
21. about 1 million computers are used for google's operation and about 1 billion search requests are handled every day.
22. google is a dog-friendly company as per its code of conduct. they state in a quirky way, that it is a “dog company...as a rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.”
23. google’s first-ever twitter post was: “i’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010."in february 2004. which is binary for “i’m feeling lucky.”
24. google started the tradition of april fool jokes in april 2000, when it brought the “mentalplex,” which said google has ability to read a person’s mind as he visualises the search results he wants.
25. if you use are using google calendar, "google knows more about you than your mother." google know your schedule, all the books you’ve read on google books, all the videos you have watched on youtube. google also remember all your search queries, the date and time of every request, your ip address, your sms messages, your browser and its set language, the cookies used for advertising services, and third-party application data. scared yet?
26. in the year 1998, the google's homepage used a yahoo like exclamation mark in its logo.
27. in the year 2007, the forbes magazine showcased google as the best place to work in the u.s.
28. in the year 2007, google with norad decided to follow santa claus on christmas eve using google earth in 3d.
29. in the year 2010, google accepted that in the previous three years, they have mistakenly collected the data sent by people over unencrypted wi-fi networks.
30. in january 2003, the american dialect society said that the word 'google' is the is the most useful word for 2002.
31. in june 2006, google was added as a verb in the oxford english dictionary (oed).
32. google received a record 75,000 job applications for 6,000 openings in one week in february 2011.
33. remember “googolplex,” which was earlier being considered by larry page and sergey brin as the name of the company, which means 10 to the power of googol. the name was later adopted the for their corporate campus in mountain view, california.
34. page and brin decided that the total number of words on the homepage of google should not exceed 28.
35. not willing to leave the school to devote time to their new search engine, page and brin tried to sell google.com for $1 million to altavista. fortunately, alta vista was shut down and google had by then surpassed other search engines.
36. the “chief culture officer” is actually a job title at google and his or her main job is to retain the unique culture of the company, which includes flat organisation, lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment, and keeping googlers happy.
37. the authors of 'a billion wicked thoughts' crunched some data from google, bing, and yahoo! ranking the most popular sex terms used for search. the top 10 terms were: 1. youth (13.5 per cent) 2. gay (4.7 per cent) 3. milfs (4.3 per cent) 4. breasts (4 per cent) 5. cheating wives (3.4 per cent) 6. vaginas (2.8 per cent) 7. penises (2.4 per cent) 8. amateurs 9. mature 10. animation.
38. google was pressurised by the u.s. government to provide google usage records for further investigations into online pornography.
39. googleplex have google bikes parked throughout the campus that employees can hop on and ride. none of these bikes are locked and employees can simply take them whenever they need them. google is also known for its "20 per cent time," which states that one day a week employees can take simply to work on something that interests them.
40. after introducing “did you mean...” feature, google's site traffic doubled.
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