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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google
Google, the world's biggest search engine, celebrated its 15 birthday on September 4.
Let's take a look at some amazing facts that trace its history.
Source: The Guardian
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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google
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
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
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
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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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google
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
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
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.