Google History
7. In Google Maps Street View, you can virtually tour some buildings, landmarks and museums.
8. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.
9. As of 2012, Gmail is the world’s largest email provider.
10. Gmail users can use their accounts to make calls to any phone number in the U.S. for free.
11. In 2004, Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten developed an early version of Facebook and named it “Orkut” after himself. Though, it didn’t catch on in America, it became a hit in Brazil and India.
Records, Awards, Honors
12. Google became the world’s largest search engine in June of 2000.
13. “Google” was voted by the American Dialect Society as the most useful word of the year for 2002.
14. “PC Magazine” recognized Google as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
15. Google is ranked the #1 place to work.
16. As of 2013, Google has surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable technology company.
Fun Facts
17. Google collects anonymous cell phone data like car speeds of mobile GPS users in order to give its live traffic updates.
18. In 2009, a Google programmer accidentally blocked the every website on the Google index as “malware,” effectively causing Google to shut down for an hour until the problem was fixed.
19. Google’s first April Fool’s Day prank was the MentalPlex hoax, which invited users to project a mental image of what they wanted to find in order to make a search, then displayed “error” messages such as “Weak or no signal detected. Upgrade transmitter and retry” or “Multiple transmitters detected. Silence voices in your head and try again.”
20. The founders of Google once considered calling it the “What Box,” until one of them pointed out that it sounded too much like “wet box,” which sounded “like some kind of porn.”
21. Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button is almost never used, but users believe that removing it would take away from the user experience.
22. The founders’ original plan had been to sell Google for $1 million, but there were no takers; It is now worth $240.6 billion.
23. The reason the Google homepage is so simplistic is because its founders did not know enough HTML to design an elaborate page.
24. The most searched terms on Google in 2012 were 1.) Whitney Houston, 2.) Gangam Style and 3.) Hurricane Sandy.
25. Google’s first playable doodle was launched on Pac Man’s 30th birthday in 2010
Company Culture
26. Google Founders’ Award is a special award given in the form of stock grants the highest achieving employee at Google Inc. The program was initiated by the founders in 2004 to award its best employees.
27. Google’s first company dog was a Leonberger named Yoshka.
28. Google has over 19,000 employees.
29. Google employees are known as “Googlers.”
30. New Google employees are known as “Nooglers.”
Innovation
31. 45% of Google’s products are currently in Beta. 32. Google is developing technology for a self-driving car. 33. Google launched Google Glass, a wearable head-mounted computer which allows users to use the internet via voice commands as well as film, record sound and take pictures. 34. Google Glass is being used to develop technology to allow dogs to speak to humans. 35. Google Glass is also being used in Google’s newest project: Google Gaze, which would send images from Google Glass to show which ads the wearer had seen, thus allowing Google to charge the advertiser. 36. Google developed a computer system that can perform tasks such as finding images on the internet using a highly complex algorithm that gives it the ability to “think” and learn almost like a human brain.
Stats and Figures
37. About 97% of Google’s total revenues come from advertising. 38. Google is available in 88 different languages. 39. Google had 5,134,000,000 average searches per day in 2012, compared to 9800 in its first year in 1998. 40. By 2000, 1 billion pages had been indexed on Google. 41. By 2008, 1 trillion pages had been indexed on Google. 42. Google has 7.2 billion daily page views. 43. 57% of the top 10,000 websites use Google Analytics. 44. There are 200,000 Apps available for the Android in the Google Play store. 45. One third of all search queries are first-time queries, meaning it is the first time those words have been searched together in a given order.
Algorithm
46. The Google algorithm no longer uses “meta keywords” as a ranking factor.
47. The automated programs used to determine rankings are called “spiders” or “crawlers.” 48. Webmasters who use illegitimate SEO practices are known as “Black Hats” and Google constantly updates its algorithm to prevent them from ranking. 49. Quality content is the most important factor in page ranking. 50. PageRank was named after Google co-founder Larry Page.