15 Things You Didn't Know About Google

posted by vivek pal on 18 feb 2014

It has been 15 years since Google has been around and it is an eminent part of the lives of netizens. You may know a lot about Google, but there's a lot that you may not know so far. We bring to you some little-known facts, that make Google an even interesting name. Have a read: 1. Google gets money from rival companies too: Google is one the few tech companies that pays money to almost all its rivals. Almost all of Mozilla's money comes from Google, given that Google pays over $300m a year to be the default search engine on Mozilla's web browser Firefox. Others in the league are Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo, who all make use of Google services. 2. Google Slogan: According to Google, the official slogan is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil".

3. The founder’s wealth: Founderts Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16 per cent of the company. Despite this, combined, they have a net worth of around $46 billion.

4. “I’m feeling lucky”: Google's first official tweet was the words "I'm feeling lucky" in binary.

5. Gmail: The email service was launched in 2005 and is now available in more than 50 languages. The Gmail idea was the brainchild of Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google. It was later developed by Paul Buchhe. Gmail, which was used internally for Google employees initially, went public on 1, 2004 by making fun of paper-based archiving by introducing "Gmail Paper", where a user could click a button and Gmail would purportedly mail an ad-supported paper copy email archive for free.

6. Google data: Google's search index is more 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.

7. Reading CAPTCHA: Google uses reading CAPTCHA to teach computers how to read text. With 200,000 million CAPTCHAs solved each day. Google's computers learn how to identify words scanned from books even if they're warped.

8. The miscellany: The company might be the only one in the world with the explicit goal of ensuring reduction in the total time spent by people on its site. The world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos each month, over twice as long as modern humans have existed.

9. Google’s green data centers: In its Lowa data center, there is over 115,000 square feet of space, where there are 9 more such data centers owned by Google. These run Google’s internet services like Google Search, Google+, Gmail, its cloud services and others. To counter the huge waste of water that comes with a huge facility, Google has turned to chilly outside air and even seawater for greener ways to cool its data centers. The search giant has also tapped into recycled waste water to cool a data center in Douglas County, Georgia.

10. Google’s in house chef leads a team of 150 employees: The first in-house chef to be hired by Google was Charlie Ayers, in November 1999. Back then, the company had just 40 employees. He got his share of publicity and by the time he left Google in 2006, Ayers and his team of five chefs and 150 employees were serving 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafes across the company's headquarters campus in Mountain View, CA.

11. Google IPO turned many of its employees into millionaires: what we all know is that the company went public in 2004. What we don’t know is that the IPO turned many of its employees into millionaires.

12. Google Acquisitions: On an average, Google has acquired one company every week since 2010. Some names that we are all aware of include big companies like Android, Motorola Mobility, Quickoffice and many others.

13. Page and Brin wanted to sell Google for $1 million but it was offered with only $750,000: The owners wanted to sell. They approached the Excite CEO George Bell and told him they would sell it for $1 million. He however, didn’t see this as being a worth offer and told them he would buy for just $7,50,000.

14. Google Doodle: The first Google Doodle made its appearance in 1998 and was in celebration of the Burning Man festival. The first interactive Google doodle was announced in May 2012. It celebrated the 30th anniversary of the arcade game Pac-Man, in association with Namco. Searchers play Pac-Man within their browser by clicking the 'Insert Coin' button. The game got viral with the users; so that Google made it a permanent site after the Doodle had been removed.

15. Why Android is named after desserts and sweets?: This is something that even this writer has always wondered about. Android updates have been named Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and recently KitKat. According to Google, "It's kind of like an internal team thing, and we prefer to be a little bit - how should I say - a bit inscrutable in the matter, I'll say.” "The obvious thing is that, yeah, the Android platform releases, they go by dessert names and by alphabetical order for the most part," he added.