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This article was first published 11 years ago

15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Last updated on: September 27, 2013 18:51 IST

Image: CEO Eric Schmidt at Google's headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Photographs: Enrique Marcarian/Reuters

Technology giant, Google is celebrating its 15th birthday on 27 September though the company was incorporated on September 4 1998. 

The company changed its birthday to 27 September from 2005 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that they were indexing, says a First Post report.

Google is celebrating its birthday with an interesting pinata doodle on its home page.

Let's take a look at some amazing facts that trace its history.

Source: The Guardian

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Tags: 1

15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Google's employees play table soccer at a recreational area at their Singapore office.
Photographs: Edgar Su/Reuters

The first step

Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford when Page is assigned to Brin, a University of Michigan student planning to join Stanford, to show the campus, in 1995. Soon they start collaborating on a search engine called BackRub in 1996.

After a year, they decide to change the search engine's name to Google - a play on the word “googol", a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Google's employees at a pantry decorated with vintage Singapore advertisements and signages.
Photographs: Edgar Su/Reuters

Mergers and acquisitions

On average, Google has bought more than one company every week since 2010.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Billiards room at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

First doodle

The first doodle the company ever created was the symbol of Burning Man, a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada in the United States, in 1998. The idea behind this doodle was to let people know that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were attending the festival.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Food preparation team sit down to eat at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Culinary delight

Usually it's big companies that have their own in-house chef, but Google hired one in 1999 when it had only 40 workers.

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Tags: Google

15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Binary code is written on the wall of the kitchen that displays Google company messages at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Big jump

Charlie Ayers, the first chef, became the company's executive chef, managing a team of 150 workers across 10 restaurants at its base in Mountain View, California.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Google employee Andrea Janus demonstrates the use of the mini-putt green on the balcony at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Massive reach

Gmail, the email service of Google, is available in more than 50 languages, including Tagalog, Malayalam and Telugu.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: An employee demonstrates the use of an exercise cycle, that powers a blender making a fruit smoothie, inside the gym at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Raking in the cash

About 1,000 Google workers became overnight millionaires when the company went public in 2004.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Music room at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Massaging pays off

Bonnie Brown, a masseuse, used to give back rubs to employees for $450 a week in 1999, but became a millionaire when Google went public in 2004.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: An employee works in the kitchen beside a structure made of recycled bicycles at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Costly button

It has been estimated that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes users directly to the first search result, costs the tech giant about $100 million in lost ad revenue every year.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: A Google Android figurine sits on the welcome desk as employee Tracy McNeilly smiles at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Goat herder

To eat the grass and fertilise the soil at its California headquarters, the company hired 200 goats for seven days in 2009.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: A man walks by the reception desk at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Binary tweet

First official tweet sent by the tech giant was "I'm feeling lucky" in binary.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: People walk by a YouTube sign at the Google office in Toronto, Canada.
Photographs: Mark Blinch/Reuters

Default payment

The tech giant pays $300 million a year to rival company Mozilla just to be the default search engine on web browser Firefox. Mozilla earns almost all of its revenue through Google.

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Tags: Mozilla

15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Headquarters of Google France in Paris.
Photographs: Jacques Brinon/Pool/Reuters

Owners' share

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the company, own just 16 per cent share of Google.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Employees stand in a break room designed as a subway station at the Google building in Zurich, Switzerland.
Photographs: Arnd Wiegmann/Pool/Reuters

Not a small pie

Although Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16 per cent share, this provides them a combined net worth of about $46 billion.

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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Image: Google's offices in Venice, Los Angeles, California.
Photographs: Lucy NicholsonReuters

Language barrier

The reason why Google's homepage is so sparse is because the company founders did not know HTML, the main language for creating web pages. The page did not even have a submit button for a long time, according to Business Insider.

Tags: HTML