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In 1997 Google's prototype was named "Backrub". |
The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'. |
Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was called by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne. |
Google.com - The Domain was registered on 15th september 1997.` |
Google started off its first operations in a rented garage. |
The first ever review of the Google search engine was done by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine watch on August 4, 1998. |
Larry and Sergey needed large amount of disk space to test their Page rank also, but the largest hard disk available at the time were only 4 GB. So they assembled 10 of these drivers together , while he was an Undergrad at Michigan University, Larry had built a Programmable plotter out of LEGO, so its only natural that he used the colourful bricks to create Google's first Computer storage. |
The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. |
Sun Microsystem co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim knew a good thing when he saw it. After talking to Larry and Sergey about Google for 30 minutes, he whipped out his checkbook and wrote a check for $100,000, made out to "Google, Inc." Problem was, Google, Inc. hasn't existed yet!Oh, by the way, the Sun in Sun Microsystem stands for "Stanford University Network." |
Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker. |
One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when Google introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area. |
The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button. I’m Feeling Lucky Costs Google $110 Million a Year. |
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Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6. |
Google publishes variety of logos commemorating holidays and events. The first one on the books being a self-made “Burning Man” logo by the founders themselves. |
Google’s first chef Charlie Ayers, ( hired in 1999 ) quit Google and opened his own restaurant in 2005. |
Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model. |
Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system. |
Google products appear in 117 type of languages, including 5 “fake” languages like Elmer Fudd and Swedish Chef. Spanish, German, French and Japanese are the most used search language besides English. |
Google’s first ever April Fool’s joke went online on April 1st, 2000 and was called “MentalPlex” – Google’s ability to read your mind. |
The Google logo was never centered (as it appears today). It only appeared centered in March 2001. It was aligned to the left earlier. (And there were a lot more distractions then). |
Google’s first employee is Craig Silverstein. Craig is the man behind “exact search” (where you get pages containing the exact search term within quotes.) |
In 1999, when Google moved to their Paolo Alto office, there were only 19 employees in the company. Today there are 0ver 24000 Googlers. |
Google reckons only 10% of the world’s information is online. |
It will take Google 300 years to put the entire world’s information online |
According to Google, 20-25% ofborder-alt: solid red .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid red .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 5.45in;" valign="top" width="523"> Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica |
Google believes up to 20% of the online content changes every month. |
Google uses over 300 factors to rank websites which includes PageRank |
According to Google, 20-25% of the search queries are unique. |
In Google, thousands of computers are involved in processing a single search query. |
Google uses over 200 signals for Pagerank. |
A lot of Googlers work on automatic translation tools. Google has the largest network of translators in the world. |
Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices. |
Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world. |
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