Few companies become so iconic that they become a literal verb. Google is one such company, and it’s turning 25 on September 4.
We’ve been ‘Googling’ for 25 years now, and the name has quickly become synonymous with the internet itself.
But how much do you really know about the ubiquitous search engine?
Here are 15 facts about the tech behemoth you might now know.
1. Google’s founders met in 1995 at Stanford University when Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around.
Page and Brin struck up a friendship and eventually invented Google from their university dorm rooms. Together, they developed the PageRank algorithm, the foundation of Google’s search engine.
2. ‘Backrub’ was the original name given to the search engine that we now know as Google. The name Google is a play on the mathematical expression ‘Googol’ for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
3. Google Inc’s first office was a garage in Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki, who was employee ‘no 16’ – and is now the current CEO of YouTube.
4. ‘Don’t be evil’ was the company’s first motto. Following the company’s corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. In 2015, ‘Do the right thing’ became its new motto.
5. The first Google server was partly built of Lego bricks. In 1996, the founders needed a large amount of diskspace to test their Pagerank algorithm on actual world-wide-web data. At that time 4 GB disks were the largest available, so they built a Lego brick disk box for their storage server.
6. In 1998, the first Google Doodle started at the Burning Man festival, where Page and Brin dreamt up a creative way to share their holiday status with staff.
Inspired by the humanoid sculpture at the festival venue, they inserted a stick figure behind the second letter ‘o’ of the Google logo. Its position was a humorous riff on corporate ‘out of office’ notifications. The site only went public a month later, so the first Doodle was only seen by the first Google employees.
7. In 2006, ‘Google’ was officially listed as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was defined as as the act of ‘using the Google search engine to find information on the internet’.
8. When Google announced Gmail, it was brushed off as an April Fools’ Day joke. On April 1, 2004, the company launched it’s free email service. It was first called ‘Caribou’ and used by Google employees internally.
9. Google bought video platform YouTube a year after it was launched on 2005. It was originally designed to be a video dating site called ‘Tune In Hook Up’, and the domain name ‘youtube.com’ February 14, 2005, Valentine’s Day.
10. The company also has fun names for its employees: Google employees are called Googlers. New hire Googlers are Nooglers and former Googlers are Xooglers.
11. Today the company’s headquarters ‘Googleplex’ spans 4 million square feet and has its own zip code, 94043.
12. The company is known for its dog-friendly offices but the dog that started the trend was Yoshka, a Leonberger that belonged to Urs Hölzle, a software engineer and long-time Googler. Yoshka passed away in 2011, and in his honour, a cafe at the Googleplex was named after him.
13. In 2019, Page and Brin stepped down from their day-to-day roles at Google’s parent company to focus on ‘moonshot’ projects like artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.
14. Google Maps almost started a war in 2010 when a Nicaraguan official barged into neighboring Costa Rica claiming the map said he was still in his country. Imperfect borders on Google Maps have led to tensions in multiple locations so some places now have multiple names e.g. ‘Londonderry/Derry’ or clickable political annotations with short descriptions of the issues.
15. In 2019, Google admitted that its Street View cars were accidentally ‘Wifi Sniffing’ or gathering extracts of personal web activity from domestic wifi networks since 2007.
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