23 Most Interesting Facts about Google on its 18th Birthday

This year on the 27^th of September, our best friend who answers almost all our queries provided that’s not very personal, Google turned 18 entering into its adulthood, officially. Sorry for the poor joke but unofficially the search giant was anyway an adult, for we have been asking all sort of question from this under 18 kid all the way through. Celebrating its 18th birthday, the tech giant has a shared a Doodle with us that was filled animated balloons created by artist Gerben Steenks. Talking about this first go-to-place for all our queries let me tell you there are a lot of mind-boggling and incredible facts about it that a lot of us are unaware of. I don’t think there would be a better time than this when we can share those with you. Here are 18 most astonishing facts about our favorite search engine- Google!

The Primitive Google

• The original name of Google was Backrub, which is a web crawler created for traversing the web.
• One of the early versions of Google could process 30-50 pages per second however Google can now 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; the Lego design would let the founders expand storage capacity easily however the index now has over 100 million GB of data.
• Since the Google’s founders had no plans starting their own business, they tried to sell their search engine system; although Yahoo originally said no, but in 2002 offered to buy Google for $3 billion however, Google said no, and it’s now valued at $400 billion.
• The name Google was a misspelling and as per one of the stories investors misspelled the mathematical term “googol” as “Google” on a check, and the spelling stuck while 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 Page Rank.
• The company’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil.”

Google and its Founders

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford when Brin was tasked to show Page around the school as a new student.
• Google has averaged a new company acquisition each week since 2010; Google acquired YouTube via meetings at Denny’s.

The Google Homepage

• The Google homepage included a Yahoo-like punctuation mark or say the exclamation point! in 1998.
• Google’s homepage is disreputably sparse as the founders didn’t know HTML to make it fancy; moreover they wanted a simple user interface. In fact, one had to press the return key on the keyboard, as they didn’t know how to design a submit button.
• The first Google Doodle was an out-of-office message in 1998 when Brin and Page were traveling to Nevada to attend the Burning Man festival; it was a doodle with a man standing behind the second O and this is how they could make users to know they wouldn’t be available to fix tech issues.
• Google cracked its first April Fool’s joke in 2000 when they announced their mind reading ability for searches called “MentalPlex.”
• The Google homepage was aligned on the right side of the page instead of centered until March 2001.
• Google added Klingon as a language interface option in 2002.

Google Communications & Applications

• Google’s first tweet was “I’m feeling lucky” in binary code that was actually like this – “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”
• The Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionaries included the verb “Google” in their listings in 2006, which is a transitive verb that means using the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.”
• The Google Street View has about 28 million miles of photographed roads.
• Google’s reCAPTCHA feature that helps users computers learn how to read text uses warped words identified by users for the computers to learn what words are in scanned books’ the computers are able to identify words scanned from books, even if they are warped.

The Google Complex

• Google rents 200 goats to “mow” the weeds and brush around headquarters; while dogs with strong bladders and friendly dispositions are welcomed in the offices cats are discouraged due to the number of dogs present.
• Known for providing gourmet food & snacks to employees, the first Google snack in 1999 was Swedish Fish, a chewy candy.
• 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.
• Employees @ Google are called Googlers except for new employees that are called Nooglers.

Long Live Google! 🙂