50 Fascinating Facts About Google You May Not Know

Google is the most visited website on the planet, but you already knew that, right? However, did you know that Google performs over 65,000 queries every second? And that’s not the only fascinating fact about Google – it has many lesser known facts and secrets that are hardly widely known. You want to know? Begin.

It amazes me that we use Google every day to search for tons of information and yet we know so little about it.

Google and its history

1. Google was originally called “BackRub”, a reference to the basic backlink checking algorithm that was created by the founders of the company in 1995, during the development of their search engine. In 1997, the developers renamed their system “Google!”.
2. The name Google comes from the word “googol (googol)” – a mathematical term representing a number with 100 zeros. This term indicates the ability of a search engine to provide access to a vast amount of information on the Internet.
3. Larry Page’s webpage, which he created at Stanford University, was the first link registered by Google.
4. Stanford University holds the patent for the “PageRank” algorithm by Google, which is responsible for the technology for measuring the importance of sites. Google has transferred more than 1.8 million shares of its company to obtain exclusive rights to the algorithm’s patent.
5. Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim was the first Google investor, initially investing $100,000 in Google in August 1998.
6. The original Google storage, that is, the first Google storage, was created from 10 4 GB hard drives using the Legos system. The total storage memory was 40 GB. It was used to store indexed search engine data in the early days of Google.
7. Google launched its first homepage in 1998 with an exclamation point at the end of the logo, like “Yahoo!” after a year of existence, the domain name became “google.com”.
8. The first doodle created by Google was a sketchy man, published on August 30, 1998 on the Google homepage on the day of the Burning Man festival. The little man was placed after the second letter “o” in the word “Google” and notified users about the “absence from work” of Google employees.
9. The MentalPlex search engine, which could read a user’s mind and find relevant information, was Google’s first April 1 prank. Users looked at the animated image and mentally imagined a picture of what they wanted to find on Google.
10. Google was declared the best search engine in June 2000 based on the results of a study of the best search engines for sites and information. The study was carried out by the independent research company NPD.
11. Yahoo! rejected Google’s offer to invest money, and, later, in 2002, Yahoo! wanted to buy Google for $3 billion, but this time they were turned down.
12. Google’s first “I feel happy” tweet was presented in binary. Binary code – a system for representing data using two characters (0 and 1), which is used on computers.
13. PAC-MAN was the first ever Google game doodle, it was created on May 21, 2010, in honor of the game’s 30th anniversary.
14. The Google design and illustrator team has produced over 2,000 drawings for the Google homepage since it first launched in August 1998.

Google and its founder

15. Alphabet Inc., which was founded in 2015, is the parent company of Google. The purpose of the organization of the company is to separate the business of web services and other ambitious companies. Its name speaks of “alpha” as “an investment that has returned above the benchmark”, which indicates that the company is very promising.
16. Alphabet Inc. is a public holding company, its website is “abc.xyz”. Its founders didn’t have much choice, they couldn’t name their site “alphabet.com” as that name was taken, so the creators settled on “abc.xyz”. I think it’s very symbolic!
17. The phrase “Do no evil” – until 2015 was the unofficial motto of the company’s rules of conduct. Alphabet’s parent company later adopted its slogan, “Do the right thing“, but the old slogan is still part of Google’s code of conduct.
18. Alphabet, along with its subsidiary Google, averaged 214 acquisitions per month from 2001 to 2017.
19. Alphabet owns various subsidiaries including Nest Labs, AdMob, DoubleClick, Kaggle, Crashlytics, Dropcam, Xively and many more.
20. Alphabet made Amazon the world’s largest internet company through the company’s market capitalization (as of February 2018).
21. Since August 2004, the market value of Alphabet’s shares has increased significantly, from $50 to $1,000 (as of 2018).
22. In 2017, for the first time in 20 years, Alphabet’s total revenue exceeded $100 billion ($110 billion).
23. The ad business is a major contributor to Google’s and even Alphabet’s revenue, reaching 84% of Alphabet’s revenue in 2017.
24. Alphabet spent about $13.9 billion on research and development activities in 2017, making it second only to Amazon.
25. Google ranked first in China for six consecutive years from 2012 to 2017 (as well as in 2007 and 2008), which means eight times in 11 years in Fortune’s Best Companies to Work From 2007 to 2017.
26. foo.bar is a secret recruitment tool Google uses to recruit developers and programmers with superior coding skills. The tool is a game for its users, which proposes to solve coding problems with increasing complexity.
27. New employees at Google are known as “Nooglers”, short for “New Googlers”. They are easily recognizable due to their colorful headdresses.
28. Google supports its employees in working on their side projects – the company devotes up to 20% of its time to this. The result of this policy is the creation of services such as AdSense, Google News, Gmail and even Orkut.

Google and its empire

29. Google, along with its many services, ranks among the “Top Sites” according to Alexa, the third-ranked company in web metrics. However, YouTube is right behind Google in second place on the list, while the Indian version of Google is in ninth place.
30. Google receives and processes more than 3.5 billion search queries per day, which equals 1.2 trillion queries per year.
31. The word “google” has gained a place in Oxford Dictionaries English as a verb meaning “Searching for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the Google search engine”.
32. “Google knows more about you than your mother,” Kevin Bankston, senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in 2009.
33. In 2017, Google regained its place as the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox. It replaced Yahoo, which was paying a hefty $375 million a year, according to Bloomberg. Although the exact amount is not yet known, but one can easily guess that Google had to offer much more than Yahoo.
34. Google has a high-tech charity platform, Google.org, which hosts various initiatives and projects (such as Khan Academy) to make an impact in sectors such as Education, Economic Opportunity and Inclusion.

Google and its spaces

35. Google’s first office space was a rented garage in Menlo Park, California.
36. Google has more than 70 offices covering 50 countries.
37. Thanks to Sergey Brin’s statement, food at Google’s offices is very close to Googlers. He also added that “no one should be more than 200 feet away from food.”
38. Google broke the mold of cubic office space and pioneered stylish workspaces with innovative décor to inspire creativity.
39. Gbikes are colorful bikes designed for use by employees at Google. Between 100 and 250 go missing on campus every week.
40. Google officially leased a herd of goats to mow the grass in the fields on its campus. This happened in 2009, at the headquarters of Mountain View, California.
41. Google has provided the California area of Mountain View with urban Wi-Fi, known as “GoogleWiFi”. The company’s headquarters are located there.
42. Google claims to be a “dog company” and reports that “cats visiting our offices will be exhausted enough.”
43. The skeletal structure of Stan, the T-Rex dinosaur standing in Google Headquarters, inspired the game Dino Run. Now this game is available to all users of Google Chrome during the absence of an Internet connection.
44. Google Headquarters showcases various structures painted in Google colors, such as a spaceship, a Lego figure, an Android statue, phone boxes, and more.

Google and its services

45. Google services experienced a 5-minute global outage in 2013, resulting in an unexpected 40% drop in global internet traffic.
46. Google dots in motion represent ongoing action on your query, meaning they tell Google that it’s processing information to provide users with results.
47. Google offers its home page in some weird languages – “Bork, bork, bork!”, Hacker, Pirate and others, including a secret language – “Pig Latin”. This is done to hide Easter eggs (Easter eggs) and thus entertain its users.
48. Google has created many Easter eggs, which are humorous results hidden in responses to certain search queries. They are designed to provide a better interaction between a company and its users. For example, if you enter the query “askew” into Google, you will see what is shown in the screenshot below.

49. Google Translate is a language translation tool from Google. It supports over 100 languages – more than any other translator.
    Google Street View is a favorite feature of Google Maps through which users can discover panoramic views of many of the world’s popular streets. To do this, Google vehicles have driven over five million miles (reported in 2012).