25 Weird Facts About Google

26 Google CRAZY FACTS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT you remember what it was like before you could "Google" something? From its revolutionary inception to its commonplace use, Google continues to be an online giant with secrets and idiosyncrasies. Do EARLY GOOGLE One of the early versions of Google could process 30-50 pages per second. Now Google can process millions of pages per second. Google was first stored on ten 4 GB hard drives in a Lego casing, now showcased by Stanford University. Backrub The Lego design would let the founders expand storage capacity easily. Google's original name was Backrub, based on the system finding and ranking pages based on back links. The index now has over 100 million GB of data. 4 Yahoo originally said no, but in 2002 offered to buy Google for $3 billion. Since the founders weren't looking to start their own business, they tried to sell their search Google said no, and it's now Google valued at $400 billion. FOR SALE engine system. The company's unofficial motto is "Don't be evil." The name Google was a misspelling. One story says investors misspelled the mathematical term "googol" as "google" on a check, and the spelling stuck. Another story says that a fellow student misspelled "googol" when looking for an available name for the company. Stanford still owns the patent to Google's algorithm, named PageRank. GOOGLE HOMEPAGE 8! 9 The first Google Doodle was an out-of-office message in 1998 when Brin and Page were traveling to Nevada to attend In 1998, the Google homepage included a Yahoo-like punctuation mark: the exclamation point! the Burning Man festival. The doodle was a man standing behind the They wanted users to know they wouldn't be available to fix 10 second O. tech issues. 11 The homepage is notoriously sparse because the founders didn't know HTML to make it fancy, and they wanted a simple user interface. Until March 2001, the Google homepage was aligned on the right side of the At first, you had to press the return key on the keyboard, as they didn't know how to design a submit button. page instead of centered. 12 Google added Klingon as a language interface option in 2002. The first April Fool's joke was in 2000 when Google announced its mind reading ability for searches called "MentalPlex." 13 GOOGLE COMMUNICATIONS AND APPS The company's first tweet was "I'm feeling lucky" in binary code. 14 "P'M 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 O0100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010." Aa In 2006, the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionaries included the verb "google" in their listings. 15 It is a verb, meaning to "Search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the search engine Google." 16 17 acertooko Google's reCAPTCHA helps their computers learn how to read text. The computers are able to identify words scanned from books, even if they are warped. The Google Street View has about 28 million miles of photographed roads. THE GOOGLEPLEX 18 19 Dogs with strong bladders and friendly disposi- tions are welcomed in the offices, but cats are discouraged due to the number of dogs Google rents 200 goats to present. "mow" the weeds Swedish Fish and brush around headquarters. 20 21 Known for providing gourmet food and snacks to employees, the first Google snack in 1999 was Swedish Fish, a chewy candy. 22 Headquarters is full of odd decorations, such as a T-Rex nicknamed Stan, a space ship, pink flamingos, a Lego figure, adult-sized ball pits, Android statues, and phone boxes painted in Google colors. While employees are called Googlers, new employees are called Nooglers. THE FOUNDERS & THEIR COMPANY 23 Larry Page's brother was a Google has averaged a co-founder of 25 26 eGroups, a dot-com company that Yahoo bought for about $500 new company acquisition each week since 2010. 24 million in 2000. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford when Brin was asked to show Page, who was a new student, around the school. Denny's Google acquired YouTube via meetings at Denny's. From the outset, Google has worked hard to be unconventional and innovative. As an archetype of the modern tech company, Google continues to set the bar for the interesting, offbeat, and creative. |WholsHostingThis? SOURCES: mashable.com, businessinsider.com, telegraph.co.uk, cnn.com, themost10.com, oxforddictionaries.com, facts.randomhistory.com, businessweek. LLLE