The Story Behind Google

We all use Google in some way or the other. The way Google has evolved is a story worth telling. Here are some of the interesting facts about Google :
1. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. It was the result of a spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’. The domain name “Googol.com” was already taken by the time Google was founded.
2. The domain Google.com was registered on 15 September 1997.
3. The first operations of Google was started in this garage
4. Google (aka Googol) is a mathematical term which means “1 followed by hundred Zeros”. The term ‘Googol’ was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.
5. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.
6. Google’s Homepage has 42 validation errors. Check Google Validation
7. Google’s homepage can be accessed in 88 languages including Urdu and Latin.
8. Every day the Google servers receives about a billion search requests . 20 to 25% of Google queries have never been searched before.
9. The main reason why the Google homepage is so simple is because the founders didn’t knew HTML. The submit button was included much later and hitting the return key was the only way to get the search results.
10. The “I am feeling lucky” button is almost never used by the end user. However it was found that removing the button would reduce theGoogle experience.
11. In the early days of testing Google employees noted people just sitting and looking at the screen. After a minute the tester asked “What are you waiting for ?”. To this the users replied “We are waiting for the page to load”.
To solve this issue the copyright message was added which acted as an end of the page marker.
12. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
13. All Google employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working in their own projects. Google news and Orkut are two big examples that grew from this working model.
14. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.
15. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.The original google project was named backrub.
16. When Google started it indexed 25,000 web pages. Today Google indexes billions of web pages and each time it grows by 10-25%.
17. According to Google “As the web grows search becomes more and more important”. It acts like a library , the bigger the library the more important is the index.
18. The pagerank algorithm uses more than 200 attributes to determine the rank of a given webpage.
19. Google has the largest corporate solar panel installation in the US.
20. The biggest break in search came when Google introduced their improved spell checker seen as “Did you mean ? ”.This feature doubled their traffic and soon the developers discovered that the ideal placement was at the bottom of the search results.
21. Every now and then Google makes small changes and test them with a given set of users. The users aren’t told of this. They are presented with a new interface and the testers observe how the users react to it.
22. Google believe in 20 % – 5% philosophy. According to this, if at least 20% of the users use a feature then it will be included. To make it to the advanced search preferences, at least 5 % of the users need to use a particular feature.
23. In the results found in user testing and design, Google testers found that only a small number of people are typical of the larger user base. Hence,Google labs was born and it monitors how people use each and every service.
24. Gmail – Free email from Google was used internally for nearly 2 years by Google employees before it was launched for public use. The engineers discovered that there are typically 6 types of email users and Gmail was made to satisfy the needs of them.
25. Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of 8 billion web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.
26. They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a black hole.
27. Google’s first April fool prank went live on April 1st,2000 and was coined “MentalPlex” – Google’s ability to read your mind.
Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool’s Day was a joke.
28. Google Groups comprises of more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world’s largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.
29.In a 2006 report of the world’s richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #26 with a net worth of $12.9 billion, and Larry Page was #27 with a net worth of $12.8 billion
30. There isn’t any restriction for proper dress code in the Google office. This may include pajamas and even super hero costumes.
31. Tom Vendetta is the youngest google employee ever hired. He was hired by Google when he was 15 years old. Vendetta used to fool his friends by sending fake press releases and news. Vendetta was employed to know the know-how of the teen and to implement them in Gmail security flaws.
32. The first employee that google hired is Craig Silverstein.
33.The first human being named after Google is Oliver google kai. He was born on September 12th 2005 and his parents named him because they wanted Oliver to have as many friends as google has.