A few facts about Google that you probably didn’t know before
Google celebrated its 15th birthday on September 4th, which is quite a respectable age in the IT world. This time has shown that the company has gone through an interesting path from confused student beginnings to a huge cooperation that is able to influence the life of each of us. And how many interesting facts have been collected during that time… so we present some of them.
1. The original search engine was called BackRub. Its tagline was “BackRub – a web crawler designed for web travel”. Only a little later, Larry and Sergey decided that they needed a more serious and better-sounding name for their activity.
2. Starting in 2010, Google “absorbs” one company per week on average. In most cases, these are smaller but promising start-ups.
3. The first image in the Google header («doodle») became “Burning Man”. Brin and Page themselves created it in 1998 to symbolize their participation in the “Burning Man” festival and at the same time their absence from the office. It’s an eight-day event that takes place every year on the last Monday in August in the state of Nevada, during which all kinds of contemporary art are exhibited in the desert. The festival ends with the burning of a huge wooden man, hence the name of the festival.
4. The first chef was hired by Google when there were less than 40 people working in the company. His name was Charlie Ayers. Interestingly, in order to get his position, the chef had to pass an audition to prepare various dishes, the jury included Google employees themselves. Subsequently, Charlie Ayers started his own company that manages 10 cafes in Mount View, California. About 150 people work in them.
5. The Gmail interface has been translated into 50 world languages. Among them are also such exotic languages as: Welsh, Basque, Malayalam, Telugu, etc.
6. After the company went public in 2004, around 1,000 Google employees became millionaires,
7. One of these newly minted millionaires was also Bonnie Brown, who in 1999 secured a job with the company as a masseuse at a salary of $450 a week.
8. The I’m Feeling Lucky button, which simply redirects users to the first result in the search list, costs Google $100 million a year in lost ad revenue.
9. Google hires not only people but also animals. An example is in 2009, when the company employed 200 goats to tidy up the grassy area around the company’s headquarters in California. These are a kind of “mowers” that fertilize the soil at the same time.
10. The first tweet from Google was the phrase “I’ll try my luck”, which was created in the binary system.
11. Today, Mozilla gets almost all of its revenue from Google, $300 million a year for the search engine to be installed as standard in Firefox browsers.
12. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page today have a 16% stake in the company.
13. However, if we convert this 16% share into cash, the amount is 46 billion USD.
14. New workers at Google are called “Noogler”. Conversely, former employees are given the nickname “Xoogler”.
