Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on September 4, 1998, and it really does in essence control the World Wide Web.
Jimmy Wales put it best “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist”, and that’s exactly my opinion, when have you ever had a problem and not said “Google it?”.
Google makes any homework, research or general collation of information a thousand times easier than a trip to the library.
All this, whilst allowing you to look anywhere in the world at any point in time, and yet you’ll still always go straight to your street first.
Google often settles many arguments in my house and here we are going to look at some mind-boggling facts that’ll make you want to work, use and learn about Google even more!
In the early days of Google, it could process 30-50 pages per second, today it processes millions of pages per second.
As of 2009, at their Mountain View headquarters, Google rent 200 goats to mow their lawns as a low-carbon alternative from California Grazing.
The first of many Google Doodles was an out of office message in 1998, the doodle was a man standing behind an O, the second in Goo
Klingon was added as a Google language option in 2002.
Google’s headquarters feature a range of random items and decorations, including Google colored phone boxes, a T-rex nicknamed Stan and adult-sized ball pits.
Oxford English Dictionaries and Merriam-Webster both in 2006 added the word ’Google’, it’s defined as a “search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the search engine Google”.
Google’s new employees are known as Nooglers, they are required to wear blue, yellow and red hats at their first company-wide meeting.
Google offer all employees a free lunch, in an all-you-can eat buffet style system, and snacks including cookies and salmon. The first snack given to employees was Swedish Fish in 1999.
Google acquire a new company each week on average, obtaining YouTube over meetings at Denny’s in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Google at first was stored on ten 4GB hard drives in a Lego casing for easy storage expansion. This is now on display at Stanford University. The index now has over 100 million GB of data.
Google owns numerous big names including Android the mobile operating system, Waze the GPS traffic system and Nest a smart home system.
Google bought Motorola in 2011 for $12.5 billion and selling it after its surprise downturn for $2.5 billion.
If a Google employee dies, their spouse gets half of their salary for 10 years.
Originally the Google homepage was aligned to the right and was very sparse as the founders didn’t know HTML and wanted a simple interface.
Google, in 2013, had a blackout that took down all of its services for five minutes causing a 40% drop in internet traffic across the world.
So there we have it, some facts about the internet juggernaut Google in all its glory.
Who doesn’t want to work for Google, I mean free food and an army of goat mowers, does a day at the office get any better?
Evgeny Morozov summarizes it better than I ever could “A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington [D.C.] to accomplish anything. They don’t understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.” And who doesn’t agree with that?
Google really is by far one of the biggest names across the planet.
A powerhouse that won’t be going anywhere soon and are just going to gather even more momentum, swallowing up companies like YouTube, making searching for information easier and more efficient, whilst giving you a great mail client and a million other side ventures.
