Today is the 23rd birthday of Google, the internet giant. A university research project for two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, changed the way the world uses the internet. A majority of people would have never imagined that Google would change the world on September 27, 1998, but that’s what happened.
It’s impossible for us to imagine life without Google’s innovations. If you do a simple keyword search, you can find out (almost) everything Google knows. Despite this, there are a number of fascinating facts about this internet giant that are little known. Let’s explore a few of them.
SPELLING ERROR
Google is derived from the mathematics term googol, which is the symbol 1 followed by 100 zeros. The founders chose the name because they wanted to organize ‘an infinite amount of information on the web’.
BEGAN FROM A RENTED GARAGE
Like all extraordinary stories, Google’s journey began with humble beginnings. While the internet giant now has offices in every major country, it once operated from a garage in Menlo Park, California. The founder rented the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki, who now is the CEO of YouTube.
Original name: BACKRUB
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin planned to name their company ‘Backrub’ after a university project they began in 1996. Backrub analyzed the web’s backlinks to understand a website’s importance and what other websites it was related to, so the duo chose Backrub as the name for the engine. However, the name was changed to Google.
GOOGLE OWNS MISS-SPELLED DOMAIN NAMES
The company owns multiple domain names containing misspelled versions of its name, such as gooogle.com, goolr.com, and gogle.com.
JENNIFER LOPEZ AND GOOGLE IMAGE
Despite Google’s founding in 1998, Google Images were not introduced into the world until July 2001. The idea for this new venture was inspired by a red carpet photo taken at the 2000 Grammy Awards of pop star Jennifer Lopez. The green dress Lopez wore caught the world’s attention and the Google search engine was flooded with queries about the photo. It was the most popular query back then, but Google did not have the exact way to deliver what users wanted. Thus, Google brought image searching to their platform.
CHINA BANNES IT
Google, which controls nearly 88.6 per cent of the world’s search engine market, is among the many websites blocked by the Chinese government.
THE FIRST TWEET FROM GOOGLE
In February 2009, Google announced its arrival on microblogging site Twitter with a binary Tweet. The company Tweeted, ‘I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010’ – which simply translates to ‘I’m feeling lucky’.
HIRES GOATS
It’s very common to spot goats grazing grass on Google’s headquarter lawns. As an alternative to using grass mowers, the company apparently hires goats to graze the lawns instead of hiring people.
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