Tech special: 16 amazing Google facts

Online search engine giant Google was founded on this day in 1998. On this occasion, we present some interesting trivia on the internet juggernaut

>> Founded by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who were Ph.D. students at Stanford University at the time, Google has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world.

>> The domain name Google was registered a year before its incorporation on September 15, 1997 with the firm originally being based in the garage of Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California, who would go on to head YouTube. Craig Silverstein, who was a fellow student at Stanford University with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was hired as Google’s first employee.

>> Google processes over one billion search requests and about 24 petabytes (24000 terabytes) of user-generated data each day.

>> Google.com has been listed as the most visited website in the world by Alexa in 2013. Numerous Google-owned websites like YouTube and Blogger figure in the top 100.

>> Google founders used a revolutionary technology called PageRank, which determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site. This was in stark contrast to other conventional search engines at the time that ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page.

>> Originally nicknamed ‘BackRub’, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site, the search engine was renamed, ‘Google’, a term, which originated from a misspelling of the word ‘googol’, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

>> The employees at Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, have access to a plethora of facilities and perks, which include a full-fledged recreational centre containing a workout room, rowing machines, a baby grand piano, a massage room, assorted video games, free food is available 24/7, with the offerings provided by paid vending machines prorated based on and favoring those of better nutritional value and much more.

>> During FIFA World Cup 2010, search queries including “World Cup” and “FIFA” caused the “Goooo…gle” page indicator at the bottom of every result page to read “Goooo…al!” instead.

>> The first Google Doodle in honour of the Burning Man Festival was designed by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Doodles were initially designed by a outside contractor until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed “Doodlers”.

>> Google changed its name to Topeka, in honour of the US city of the same name in 2010, whose mayor changed the city’s name to Google in return for a short time to sway Google’s decision in its new Google Fiber Project, which contained a plan to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities.

>> As of 2013, Google has over 47,756 employees, approximately 10,000 of which are software developers based in more than 40 offices.

>> Google has a long tradition of April Fool jokes…

– 2000: Google MentalPlex allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web
– 2007: Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet.

>> Apart from internet technology and development in computer software and hardware development, Google Inc has also forayed into the automobile manufacturing with the production of a fleet of driverless cars set to enter the market in the near future.

>> Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them as part of a motivation technique called ‘Innovation Time Off’. Some of Google’s newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors.

>> Google’s unofficial corporate motto, ‘Don’t Be Evil’, coined by employee and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit was meant as a jab at competitors, who the company felt were exploiting the users to some extent.

>> Google announced Gmail Motion, an interactive way of controlling Gmail and the computer with body movements via the user’s webcam in 2011.