Today is the 18th birthday of Google. Google is now officially an adult. The tech giant is celebrating its 18th birthday with, an animated balloon-filled Doodle by artist Gerben Steenks.
To mark the occasion, DSIM has come up with a list of 18 mind- blowing facts you probably didn’t know about Google.
1) Google is always confused about its own birthday. Google was actually founded on September 4, 1998. Google changed its birthday to 27 September in 2005, when it announced it was indexing record number of pages.
2) Google’s original name was Backrub. “BackRub is a ‘web crawler’ which is designed to traverse the web.”
3) Google was named thanks to the misspelling of the word ‘Googol’ (which means; 1 followed by 100 zeros)
4) The first Google doodle was a ‘Burning Man’ symbol. Founders went to the Burning Man festival in 1998 and added the doodle to let users know they were away from the office that weekend.
5) Google’s first ever Tweet in February 2009 was “I’m feeling lucky” in binary code. It was “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010”.
6) Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button costs tens of millions of dollars per year.
7) The founders of Google had even tried to sell the search engine to Yahoo! but it said ‘No’.
8) When Gmail was launched on April 1, 2004, many users believed that it was also a prank by the Google founders.
9) Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
10) Google has a pet T-rex, named Stan, which lives at their California headquarters. Founders bought it to remind the employees to not let Google go extinct.
11) Google headquarters rents about 200 goats from California to mow their lawns and fields.
12) Google takes over 200 factors into account before delivering you the results to any question. There are more than 2 million Google searches per second.
13) Employees in the Google office are called ‘Googlers’, the new employees are called ‘Nooglers’ and a former employee is referred to as a ‘Xooglers’.
14) Around 1,000 of Google’s employees became millionaires when the company went public in 2004.
15) Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16% of the company.
16) Google has acquired an average of one company every week since 2010.
17) Google gives very generous payouts to the husbands and wives of people who die while working for them.
18) Google once went down for five minutes and took 40 percent of web traffic with it.
Wish you a very Happy Birthday, Google!
