Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google, originally nicknamed BackRub, as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. On August 10, 2015, they created Alphabet to restructure Google by moving subsidiaries from Google to Alphabet, narrowing Google’s scope. It can’t be a coincidence that Google owns multiple companies under each alphabet in English.
So while we understand that Google has become synonymous with search (we too Googled Google to find the crazy information about Google) and that everyone knows something about the company, here’re some facts we bet will truly surprise you…
1. Google’s first computer storage was made from LEGO.
2. Today, Google’s search index is more than 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.
3. A single Google search requires more computing power than it took to send Apollo 11 to the Moon.
4. The domain GoogleSucks.com is owned by Google.
5. The company owns a bunch of domains that are common misspellings of Google, like Gooogle.com, Gogle.com, Googlr.com, and more.
6. If you search for “askew” in Google, the content will tilt slightly to the right.
7. Search “atari breakout” in Google Images, and you can play the game.
8. Google has found GPA’s and tests scores to be “worthless as criteria for hiring”; they have teams where 14% of their employees haven’t gone to college.
9. When a Google employee dies, their spouses receive half pay from the company for 10 years and their children US$1,000 per month until they turn 19. Every one of Google’s employees is immediately eligible regardless of how long they’ve worked there.
10. Google HQ rents goats from California Grazing to mow their lawns and fields. It costs the company about the same as mowing, but goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.
11. Google hired a camel to create the Street View of a desert.
12. According to The New York Times, Page uses the “toothbrush test” to determine whether a company is worth buying. He’ll ask, “Is this something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?”
13. Google’s first tweet ever was “I’m feeling lucky” written in binary code.
I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010
— Google (@google) February 26, 2009
14. The “I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google US$110 million per year, as it bypasses all ads.
15. Over six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube — that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth. Users upload 300 hours of video to YouTube every minute.
16. Google got its name from a misspelling of Googol, which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin wrote in their original paper on PageRank, “We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”
17. When Page and Brin created Google, they didn’t know enough HTML to make a pretty looking homepage. So they stuck with a sparse homepage with a simple interface.
18. In 1999, the founders actually tried to sell it to Excite for just US$1 million. Excite turned them down. Page’s current net worth is $33.7 billion.
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