30 Mind-Blowing Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Google

Google Inc., founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, in California, has seen a rapid growth since its incorporation, which has led to a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). Here are some unknown facts about the company:

1. Google is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet related services like online advertising, Web search engine, cloud computing, software and hardware.
2. The company was founded on September 04, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as a private company. They were pursuing their Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University and Google was a research project.
3. Google is based on new technology called ‘Page Rank,’ which determines a website’s relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to original site.
4. The Google was originally named ‘BackRub’ because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of the site. The idea for the name Google was derived by misspelling the word ’googol.’
5. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997 and its office was setup in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, at Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein was the first employee. As of October 2016, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries.
6. Google was initially funded by angel investors, Jeff Bezos of Amazin.com, DeavidCheriton a science professor at Stanford University, Ram Shriram an entrepreneur and Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems. The initial fund of $ 100,000 was generated even before its incorporation.
7. Early in 1999, the Google was in verge of being sold out to ‘Excite.’ Their offer of $ 750,000 was rejected by the Brin and Page.
8. On August 19, 2004, Google was listed and went public. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at price of $ 85 per share. The online auction generated $ 23 billion capital with many of the Google employee becoming instant paper millionaires, including Yahoo, who owned 8.4 million shares.
9. Google designated a Chief Cultural Officer, who is also the Director of Human Resources to maintain the company’s culture and work towards the value that the company was founded on.
10. In July 2005, its former employee Christina Elwell, filed a law suit alleging it had engaged in job discrimination while she was pregnant with quadruplets. She was working as national sales director.
11. In 2013, a law suit was filed for alleged ‘no-cold-call’ involving several Silicon Valley companies including Google into an agreement restraining from recruitment of high-tech employee.
12. Since fourth quarter of 2015, the shares of Google were split into ‘GOOG’ class ‘C’ shares and ‘GOOGL’ class ‘A’ shares. The company is listed as GOOG and GOOGL on the NASDAQ stock exchange and as GGQ1 on Frankfort Stock Exchange.
13. In March 1999, the company moved to its office to Palo Alto, California and on October 23, 2000, they began digital advertisement, with availability of ‘AdWords,’ which enables individualized affordable key word advertising.
14. In 2003, an office complex was leased from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California. The complex came to be known as ‘Googleplex’ a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googolzeroes. Three years later the complex was bought for $319 million.
15. In October 2006, the word Google became more and more popular to find its way into the ‘Merriam-Webster’ and the ‘Oxford English’ dictionaries. The first use of ‘Google’ as verb, can be traced back to TV series ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ in 2002.
16. The company registered 700% growth by third quarter of 2005, primarily due to online advertisement. There was a shift in large company’s advertisement strategies from paper, magazine and TV to internet. In 2012, for the first time Google generated $ 50 billion in annual revenue.
17. On September 19, 2013, Google launched a health and Well-being Company called ‘Calico’ to be led by Arthur Levinson, focusing on the challenges of ageing and associated diseases.
18. In October 2013, Google along with Facebook, Intel and Microsoft, launched the ‘Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI). This effort was to make internet more affordable to bring in line with UN Broadband Commission’s target of 5% of monthly income, even in the developing world.
19. On September 27, 2016, Google celebrated its 18th birthday with an animated Doodle shown on the web browsers around the world. The question is why 27th, when the date doesn’t relate it in anyway except for a dispute with rival search engine Yahoo over indexing.
20. In September 2015, it was revealedby Google engineering manager, Rachel Potvin, that the entire Google codebase of every single service it develops which is over 2 billion lines of code is stored in ‘version control system’ called ‘Piper.’ There is wealth of libraries available for any new project. Engineers can make single code change and deploy it on all service at a time.
21. In 2001, Google acquired Deja News and in space of six years, it had expanded its base with ‘Applied Semantics’ in 2003, ‘Keyhole, Inc’ aka ‘Google Earth’ in 2004, ‘Urchin Software’ in 2005 and in November 13, 2006 the ‘YouTube’merger was finalized for $ 3.1 billion.
22. In 2010, for the first time Google invested in renewable energy by commissioning two wind farm in North Dakota, with a capacity to generate 169.5 megawatts of power. In the same year it purchased ‘Global IP Solution’ a web based teleconferencing provider.
23. On August 15, 2011, Google acquired ‘Motorola Mobility’ for $ 12.5 billion mainly to overcome Android operating system industry wide patent battle. After restructuring it, to fit Google’s strategy, sold manufacturing operations to Flextronics for $ 75 million with an agreement to manufacture undisclosed Android and other mobile devises. It was sold in 2014 to Lenovo.
24. In December 2016, Google announced that starting 2017, it will power all of its data centers and offices with renewable energy. This makes Google the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power of wind and solar energy.
25. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called ‘Alphabet’ with Google being its leading subsidiary. With Sundar Pichai taking over Google as its CEO and Larry Page moved to Alphabet.
26. In January 2010, Google released ‘Nexus One’ the first Android phone under its own ‘Nexus’ brand and in 2011 the ‘Chromebook’ a new kind of computer running chrome OS. The ‘Chromecast’ dongle that allows users to stream content from smartphone to televisions was introduced in July 2013.
27. In September 2016, a project for public Wi-Fi at railway station in India began and by December it was deployed in 100 stations, enabling 15,000 users.
28. As of February 2016, Google employees 61,000 people as a most attractive employer to graduating students. Its philosophy is ‘you can make money without doing evil’ ‘you can be serious without a suit’ and ‘work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun.’
29. Since 1998, Google has been designing special temporary alternate logos called Doodles, to place on their homepage to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people. The first Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998.
30. In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic ‘Google.org’ with start-up fund of $1 billion, in an effort to create awareness about climate change, global poverty and global public health.