Google the world’s biggest search engine, has lots of fascinating and crazy facts about them. In no particular order of importance, here are 25 of them.
1. Google was originally called “Backrub”.
2. When a Google employee dies, their spouses receive half pay from the company for 10 years and their children US$ 1000 per month until they turn 19.
3. Google intends to scan all known
existing 129 million unique books before 2020.
4. Every day 16% of the searches that occur are ones that Google has never seen before.
5. Google hired a camel to create the street view of a desert.
6. Microsoft pays you to use Bing instead of Google.
7. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button costs Google US$ 110 million per year, as it bypasses all ads.
8. Every minute, 2 million searches are performed on Google.
9. Because Gmail first launched on April 1st of 2004, many people thought it was an April fool’s day prank.
10. On April fool’s day of 2007, Google sent an Email out to its employees warning that a python was loose in the facilities. It was not a joke.
11. Google first tweet ever was “I’m Feeling Lucky” written in binary code.
12. Google got its name by accident. The founders misspelled “Googol”, which refers to the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes.
13. Google prefers dogs to cats. Their official code of conduct specifically states that they are a dog company.
14. On August 16, 2013, Google went down for 5 minutes and in that time, the global internet traffic dropped by 40%.
15. The first Google doodle was dedicated to the “Burning man festival” attended by Google founders in 1998.
16. Google’s search index is more 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.
17. The world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos each month, over twice as long as modern humans have existed.
18. Google uses reCAPTCHA to teach computers how to read text. With 200,000 million CAPTCHAs solved each day, Google’s computers learn how to identify words scanned from books even if they’re warped.
19. Its main page is so sparse because Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know HTML. For a long time you could only search by hitting the return key – it didn’t even have a submit button.
20. On average, Google has acquired more than one company every week since 2010.
21. In 2011, 96% of Google’s $37.9 billion revenue came from advertising alone.
22. Google has photographed 5 million miles of road for its Street View maps.
23. Around 1,000 of Google’s employees
became millionaires when the company went public in 2004. One of those millionaires was masseuse Bonnie Brown, who worked at the company giving back rubs for $450 a week back in 1999.
24. Almost all of rival company Mozilla’s money comes from Google. The firm pays $300m a year to be the default search engine on Mozilla’s web browser Firefox.
25. A new Google employee is known as a “Noogler” and a former employee is referred to as a “Xoogler”.
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