1. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.
2. The name Google was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for Googol.
3. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.
4. The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
5. 57% of American kids say ‘Google’ as their first word.
6. 620 million visitors visit Google.com daily.
7. Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.
8. Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of billions of web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.
9. When Google introduced their improved spell checker seen as “Did you mean ? ”, it doubled their traffic and soon the developers discovered that the ideal placement was at the bottom of the search results.
10. There isn’t any restriction for proper dress code in the Google office. This may include pajamas and even super hero costumes.
11. In August 2004, Google went public with opening shares at $85 per share. Google stated that during its IPO, it hoped to raise as much as $2,718,281,828, which is the first 10 digits of the mathematical constant “e.” It raised $1.67 billion.
12. According to Alexa (“The Web Information Company”), Google is the Internet’s most visited website globally.
13. The late Steve Jobs said he would be willing to “go thermonuclear war” against Google, a company he thought was guilty of “grand theft” when it launched its Android operating system.
14. Google’s tradition of April Fool’s jokes began in April 2000 when Google announced the “MentalPlex,” or Google’s ability to read a person’s mind as he visualizes the search results he wants.
15. If you use Google Calendar, Google may also know your schedule, what books you’ve read on Google Books, and what videos you watch on YouTube. They also save all your search queries, your IP address, your browser and its set language, the date and time of every request, your SMS messages, the cookies used for advertising services, and third-party application data. According to one critic, “Google knows more about you than your mother."
16. Reluctant to leave school to devote time to their new search engine, Page and Brin attempted to sell google.com for $1 million to AltaVista. Fortunately for them, Alta Vista passed . . . as did Yahoo!, Excite, and other search engines.
17. Google’s first-ever Twitter post was in February 2004. It was binary for “I’m feeling lucky.
18. A Google employee is named a “Googler” while a new team member is called a “Noogler.
19. Google makes 99% of its profit from its advertising.
20. Some Web researchers note that Google helps prop up Wikipedia as an information source since more than 50% of the traffic to Wikipedia is generated from Google searches.
21. When Google went public, many employees became instant millionaires. Yahoo!, which owned 8.4 million shares of Google stock before Google’s IPO, also benefited.
22. Stanford, which holds the patent to the PageRank algorithm Larry Page created, gained profit of $336 million,the most money any university has ever received from a single invention.
23. Google owns YouTube, DoubleClick, On2 Technologies, Picnik, Aardvark, AdMob, Zagat, and Motorola Mobility.
24. There are Google bikes parked throughout the Googleplex that employees can hop on and ride from building to building. None of them is locked; employees simply take them when they need them.
25. A doctor regularly visits the Google campus so Googlers don’t have to leave the office for a checkup. Google is also known for its “20% time,” the one day a week that employees can take simply to work on something that interests them.
