The most used search engine has seen a rapidly dynamic
evolution in its 19-year journey which touched the lives of all so much so that
life without it seems unimaginable!
The world celebrates the most popular search engine Google's
19th birthday on Wednesday. As part of the celebration, Google has a fun search
spinner Google Doodle that will link to 19 surprises the search engine has
launched over the years as well as the new snake game.
Two Standford buddies, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created
the search engine in a garage, which has now revolutionized the digital
spectrum globally. It has seen a rapidly dynamic evolution in its 19-year
journey which touched the lives of all so much so that life without it seems
unimaginable!
However, there are a plenty of facts which are not known to
a lot. On its birthday, let's have a look at the whacky facts about the
Internet mammoth.
Google's name comes from the mathematical term
"googol" which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. Conjecture suggests the
name came into being due to a misspelling.
The founders, Page and Brin, had initially named the
search engine as "Backrub" based on system findings and backlinks.
In its early stage, Google could only process 30-50 pages
per second compared to more than a million pages per second now.
Early on, Google's database used to be stored in ten 4GB
hard drives in a lego casing which is now used as a decorative showpiece in the
headquarters of the company.
Google which is known for providing gourmet food and
snacks to its employees in their offices. In 1999, the first-ever snack served
was Swedish Fish, a chewy candy.
Stanford University still owns the patent to Google's
algorithm which is known as "PageRank".
The first Google doodle came out on August 30, 1998, which
showed a Burning Man stick figure when the founders went to attend the Burning
Man festival in Nevada. It was added to convey to the users that technical
issues in the server could not be fixed as they were out of town.
Google has been acquiring an average of one company every
week since 2010. Youtube, Android and Waze are some of the major companies
taken over by Google.
The company also owns the domains for the common
misspellings of its name which includes www.gooogle.com, www.gogle.com and
www.googlr.com.
The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have specific
runways for their private jets in NASA where planes aren't allowed to land.
As part of 'green initiative', Google rents around 200
goats every year to mow the fields and bushes in its headquarters in
California.
The headquarters also has the skeleton of a T-rex dinosaur
on display which has been named as "Stan". It is placed there to
remind employees that Google should not be extinct.
The Google Homepage has very bare design as the founders
had no knowledge of HTML when they created it. Hence, they wanted a simple
interface. The first version of Google did not have a 'submit' tab on the
homepage and users had to press the 'return' key instead.
If a Google employee passes away while being employed, the
surviving spouse is entitled to 50 percent of their annual salary for a decade.
"Google Mirror" is a rotated version of Google
which shows everything as a mirrored reflection. It proved to be useful for
bypassing China's firewall which had banned Google in the country for some
time.
The founders were not too keen on making a business out of
Google and thus tried to sell it to an online company "Excite" in
1999 for USD 1 million. Later, they also approached Yahoo which denied the
offer. But, Yahoo had offered to buy it for USD 3 billion in 2002 but this time
the owners turned it now. The company is currently valued at USD 400 billion.
Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionaries included
'google' as a verb in 2006 which means "to use the Google search engine to
obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web".
