44 Astonishing Facts About Google

Google is a United States based multinational company that specializes in internet related services and products. It deals in online advertising technologies, cloud computing, Software, Hardware, and of course, it does have the most popular search engine. The company includes in the top 5 information technology companies in the U.S, along with Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. The company was introduced in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. The company has its headquarter in Mount View, California, and is the leading subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

1. Google began as a research project in 1996.
2. The search engine Google got its name from the mathematical figure googol, which denotes the number ‘one followed by a hundred zeroes or 1 googol =1.0 × 10100.
3. A ‘googolplex’ is a number so vast and big that it can’t be written down there’s not enough room in the universe for all the zeros.
4. The authentic nickname of Google was Backrub due to the backlink technology used to determine site importance but eventually changed the name to Google.
5. Google.com domain went online in 1997 but started pace in 2004.
6. In the year 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell Google search engine for $1 million to an internet portal company Excite which was part of the Khosla group founder of which is Vinod Khosla, who is among the top 400 billionaires in the United States. The prominent venture capitalist was able to negotiate Larry Page and Sergey Brin down to as low as $750,000, but Excite CEO George Bell still didn’t take the deal in the end.
7. By November 2016, Google had indexed an astounding 130 trillion (1000000000000) pages on the internet.
8. Google earns 2378.23 USD per second, which counts to be $142,680 per minute and $3,424,320 every day.
9. In 2019, Google made 162 billion USD from its proprietary advertising service, i.e., Google Ads.
10. The website domain GoogleSucks.com is owned by Google itself.
11. The first major funding of $100,000 for Google was provided by Andy Bechtolsheim, who is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
12. In the year 2019, Google has been visited 62.19 billion times, making it the most visited website on the globe.
13. Google dominates the search engine market and has over 92.18% of the market share as of July 2019.
14. About 3.5 billion searches are conducted on Google every day.
15. Besides a trillion of searches every year, over 15% of Google searches have never been searched before.
16. Google Lens is an app that is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. It helps users to identify objects through their smartphone cameras. In the year 2019, google has processed about 1 Billion questions from this app.
17. Employees at Google are encouraged to use their 20% of their time working on their own projects. Orkut and Google are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
18. Till 2015 the informal motto of the company was “Don’t be evil” and was the phrase used in the company’s code of conduct. In October 2015, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, took “Do the right thing” as its motto.
19. When Google introduced their much-improved spell checker, which was the “Did you mean” feature. This feature doubled the traffic of Google search.
20. The word Google became a verb in the year 2006 when both Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster collegiate Dictionary recognized the word. In the dictionary, google means Google search engine used to obtain information on the internet.
21. Google Chrome was launched in 2008 and was the first browser with isolated tabs, which means that if one tab is crashed, the whole browser will still function. By the year 2013, Chrome had become the dominant browser, surpassing Mozilla Firefox as well as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
22. According to a post of Google, using quantum computing to recognize and sort videos, images, and objects is discussed. Several teams at Google have been working on developing processors that can store data as quantum bits. These quantum bits can represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously, allowing much more efficient information storage and data processing. To consider this by an example given by Google, an average computer requires 500,000 peeks to find an object hidden in one of a million drawers. But with the help of quantum computers, you can find the object by just peeking into 1000 out of the million drawers.
23. Google search engine is available in 109 languages.
24. The second button, ‘I am feeling lucky’ on the Google home page, is very least used. However, in trials, it was found that removing the button from the homepage would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it to keep as it is. As it is a comfortable button to open the first result on its own.
25. On April 1, 2000, Google published its first April fool hoax known as mentaplex. It was an April fool joke, according to which Google could read people’s minds and search the internet for what they think of.
26. The search technology that google use was patented by the Stanford University. So on behalf of the founder the Lary Page, and Sergey Brin, Google gave Stanford University 1.8 million shares for exclusive rights to the patent. Later the university sold these shares for a staggering $336 million.
27. Google keeps the logs of each search query into its systems to enhance future search results.
28. Google was first started in a garage. Some other major brands that also started in a garage were Microsoft and Hp.
29. The youngest employee Google ever hired was named Tom vendetta, which was at the age of 15 when hired. Vendetta was a technical expert and use to fool his friends by sending fake news and press releases.
30. According to legend, Amazon became the number one shopping site because, in the days before the invention of the search giant Google, Yahoo would list the sites in their directory alphabetically!
31. Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
32. The “www” part of a website (www.google.com) is optional and is not required by any web policy or standard, but you can still found this on Google’s main website.
33. On major events and holidays, the Google homepage changes the classic Google logo with specialized images, illustrations, or games known as Google Doodle. First of all, Google doodles was dedicated to the Burning Man festival in 1998. You can check the past Google doodles at google.com/logos.
34. A new employee at Google is often called a Noogler.
35. Google receives more than 200 million search queries a day, more than half of which come from outside the United States. Peak traffic hours of google.com are between 6 a.m. and noon PST when more than 2,000 search queries are answered every second.
36. Google uses about 2.26 million megawatt-hours per year to power its global data center operations, which is equivalent to the power necessary to sustain 200,000 homes.
37. However, google generates a lot of their own power with their solar panels.
38. The prime reason the Google home page is so simple is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know the HTML much and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, the submit button was a later addition, and initially, hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google search into life.
39. Employees at Google are encouraged to use 20 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
40. Google’s search engine alone leaves a carbon footprint of 200 tons of CO2 every day, or 40 percent of the total internet carbon footprint. The footprint of a single search is about 0.2g of CO2.
41. Guido van Rossum is the creator of the Python programming language. He works at Google, and he spends half of his time working on python.
42. Guido van Rossum, the creator of python, works for Google, where he spends half of his time working on python.
43. Android wasn’t made by Google! It was actually developed by the company Android, Inc. in Palo Alto, California. The company was established in October month of the year 2003 by founders Rich Miner, Chris White, Nick Sears, and Andy Rubin. Google acquired the company and its employees on August 17, 2005, and asked them to continue with the development.
44. Every Android update version is named in alphabetic order. The first two versions were named Astro (1.0) and Bender (1.1). Then, after Google’s acquired Android, Inc, they named every following update with pastry-based names: CupCake (1.5), Donut (1.6), Eclair (2.0), Froyo (2.2.), Gingerbread (2.3), Honeycomb (3.0), Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), Jelly bean (4.1, 4.2 and 4.3), Kit Kat(4.4), Lollipop(5.0), Marshmellow (Android 6.0), Nougat (7.0), Oreo (8.0) and Pie (9.0).