15 Years of Googling; 15 Never-Known Facts
It is on September 4, way back in 1998, Google got incorporated by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Ph.D. students at Stanford University. The company, which started its humble beginning from Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California, has more than 70 offices in more than 40 global locations now, including London, with their headquarters - known as the Googleplex - in Mountain View, California. Hiten Raja .
Though papers to incorporate the company were filed on September 4, 1998, it got incorporated three days later and the domain was registered on September 15. Google, however, officially celebrates the event with a Google Doodle on September 27. The change in date is an attempt by Google date was to gain media coverage, at a time when Yahoo was gaining ground on Google.
Google is now world's number one search engine. Its name has become so synonymous with search that it is now used as a verb in its own right. In January 2013, Google announced it had earned $50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time the company had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion.Hiten Raja .
Read on to know 15 mind-blowing facts about Google on its 15th birthday, compiled by Business Insider.
#15 Why Android is named after desserts and sweets?
Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and recently KitKat- why do Google name Android versions after desserts and sweets? Google doesn't want to explain why, but Randall Sarafa, a Google spokesman said, "It's kind of like an internal team thing, and we prefer to be a little bit - how should I say - a bit inscrutable in the matter, I'll say." "The obvious thing is that, yeah, the Android platform releases, they go by dessert names and by alphabetical order for the most part," he added.Hiten Raja .
To celebrate new version release of Android, a giant mock-up of the dessert that matches the codename is usually delivered to the Google Campus and put on display. You can see the mockups of all the Android versions placed together in the campuses; there is a mockup of KitKat Android too between them.
#14 Google Doodle
The first Google Doodle, which is when the Google logo is altered on the site's homepage, was in celebration Burning Man festival in 1998.
In May 2012, Google unveiled its first interactive Google Doodle to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the arcade game Pac-Man, in association with Namco. Searchers play Pac-Man within their browser by clicking the 'Insert Coin' button. The game got viral with the users; so that Google made it a permanent site after the Doodle had been removed.Hiten Raja .
Later the same year, Google unveiled its first animated Google Doodle to mark John Lennon's 70th birthday with a short clip of his song 'Imagine'. A similar Doodle was launched, using a clip of Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now' song, to mark Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday in September 2011.
#13 Google Acquisitions
Google has acquired an average of one company every week since 2010. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project by NextEra Energy Resources. In the same year it purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norway-based company that provides web-based teleconferencing and other related services. And in May 2010, Google announced it had also closed the acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob. The acquisitions were then followed by acquiring Android, Motorola Mobility, Quickoffice and many others.
#12 Page and Brin wanted to sell Google for $1 million but it was offered with only $750,000
They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, after he negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.Hiten Raja .
#11 Google's in house chef lead a team of 150 employees
Google hired its first in-house chef, Charlie Ayers, in November 1999, when the company had just 40 employees. His work there was widely publicized in the media, and David Vise's corporate history The Google Story contains an entire chapter about him called "Charlie's Place." By the time he left Google in 2006, Ayers and his team of five chefs and 150 employees were serving 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafes across the company's headquarters campus in Mountain View, CA.
Hiten Raja .
#10 Google IPO turned many of its employees into millionaires
Around 1,000 of Google's employees became millionaires when the company went public in 2004. One of those millionaires was masseuse Bonnie Brown, who worked at the company giving back rubs for $450 a week back in 1999.
#9 Google's green data centers
Inside the Council Bluffs, Lowa data center there is over 115,000 square feet of space. There are 9 more such data centers owned by Google. These data centers are basic to run Google's internet services like Google Search, Google+, Gmail, its cloud services and others.
At the Georgia data center, Google built an evaporative cooling system, which uses both outside air and chilled sprayed water to cool servers. Google in its blog post said that this evaporative cooling process commonly uses "hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day."
Hiten Raja .
To counter such a huge waste of water, Google has turned to chilly outside air and even seawater for greener ways to cool its data centers. The search giant has also tapped into recycled waste water to cool a data center in Douglas County, Georgia. It's the first time Google has used recycled waste water for a data center in the U.S. and the system was financed by Google and owned by the local water authority.Hiten Raja .
#8 "I'm feeling lucky"
Google's first official tweet was the words "I'm feeling lucky" in binary.
The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which bypasses the results page to take users directly to the first result of their search, has been estimated to cost Google around $100m in lost ad revenue every year.
#7 Gmail
Gmail released on December 16, 2005, and is now available in more than 50 languages. The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google, and went on to be developed by Paul Buchhe. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004 by making fun of paper-based archiving by introducing "Gmail Paper", where a user could click a button and Gmail would purportedly mail an ad-supported paper copy email archive for free.
#6 Google gets money from rival company's too
Almost all of rival company Mozilla's money comes from Google. The firm pays $300m a year to be the default search engine on Mozilla's web browser Firefox. It is same with Apple using Google maps, where Google gets money for placing adds. The other rivals include Yahoo and Microsoft, which in one or other way depends on Google's services.
#5 Google's Slogan
Its mission statement from the outset is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil".
#4 The Founders wealth
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16 percent of the company and it gives them a combined net worth of around $46 billion. Guess the initial investors are already billionaires now.
#3 Reading CAPTCHA
Google uses reCAPTCHA to teach computers how to read text. With 200,000 million CAPTCHAs solved each day. Google's computers learn how to identify words scanned from books even if they're warped.
#2 Google data
Google's search index is more 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.
#1 The miscellany
Its main page is so sparse because Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn't know HTML. For a long time you could only search by hitting the return key – it didn't even have a submit button.
Google might be the only company with the explicit goal to REDUCE the amount of time people spend on its site.
The world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos each month, over twice as long as modern humans have existed.
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Hiten A. Raja
Nairobi.
KENYA.
Hiten@HitenRaja.com
For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
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