Google has fascinated many as a company, more as a search engine. So much that ‘to google’ was included in the Oxford dictionary as a verb. We take a look at a few interesting facts about this interesting company:
1. Google was named by mistake. YES! Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made a spelling mistake while they thought they were going for ‘Googol’.
2. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know HTML and they just wanted a quick interface. During initial tests, this simple design resulted in users calmly sitting waiting for the “rest of the page to load”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was added as a line as an end of page marker.
3. The ‘I feel lucky‘ button is hardly ever used. However during trials, it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Hence it was retained.
4. New features/preferences addition depends on the “20% – 5% “ rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. And at least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before including it into ‘Advanced Preferences’.
5. The first ever Google Doodle was made by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were out of the office to spend the weekend in the Burning Man Festival 2008. They posted the first doodle on Google’s homepage to let users know that they won’t be in the office to fix issues such as server’s crash.
6. Google’s headquarters is known as Googleplex and its employees are referred to as ‘Googlers’. The new joined folks are known as ‘Nooglers‘ and a former Googler is known as ‘Xoogler‘.
7. The Google PageRank, which indicates the rank and value of a page on the web, is actually named after Google’s co-founder, Larry Page. In the early days it was called as BackRub.
8. How much energy does a single Google Search take up? Google says a single Google search takes about 1KJ (Kilo Joules) of energy. In green terms, it’s approximately equal to .2g of CO2 emitted per search.
9. Though Google Search is available in multiple languages, till date, there haven’t been any requests from beyond the earth’s orbit. However, Google has the Klingon interface if they decide to make contact one day.
10. It would take 5,707 years to do a manual search of Google’s 3 billion Web pages at the rate of one minute a page!
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