We are all familiar with Google by now, they allow us to sift through all the material on the World Wide Web with just the click of a button. Aiding us on our quest for information and helping us get to the information we need in the most efficient possible way. Google is a name synonymous with the collection of information and here, presenting a change of pace, we present you with a collection of information about Google.
- An American mathematician by the name of Edward Kasner coined the term ‘googol’ as a word to describe an inconceivable number. The company ‘Google’ then altered the spelling and adopted the word as their company name. ‘Googol’ is essentially understood to be the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin had originally wanted to name the company ‘Backrub’.
- The lawns at the Google headquarters are maintained through the grazing of goats, rented by Google as part of the implementation of their green initiative. According to staff members the sight of the grazing goats has a calming effect.
- Google likes to buy other companies, they do this so often that they average the purchase of one company a week and have been doing so since 2010. Among their acquisitions are YouTube, the mobile map application Waze, Android Inc. and the music streaming app known as Songza.
- People who hope to one day work for Google should know that the company makes use of a web tool entitled foo.bar in order to recruit potential employees based on what they are searching online. If you are searching certain programming terms that peak the company’s interest, then Google may offer you the opportunity to apply for work.
- Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are afforded special treatment by NASA, where their private planes are allowed to make use of runways no one else is allowed to access.
- Google planned ahead and owns copyrights on potential misspellings of their name, no other company or person can own a copyright on a name that is similar to their own. So if you wanted to use gooogle or gogle you would be infringing on the copy written property of Google.
- There are many pros to being a Google employee, one of which is a benefit offered to employees in the US granting the spouse of a deceased employee 50% of the deceased individual’s salary every year for the ten years which follow their passing.
- Google offices are flooded with food, no part of the Google office is over 150 feet away from a food source.
- If ever you have trouble with the pronunciation of a large number, simply type the number into the search bar followed by ‘=English’ and the correct pronunciation of the number will appear below the search bar.
- In 1999 Google attempted to sell itself to Excite for the sum of 1 million US dollars, the offer was foolishly rejected by the CEO of Excite and Google are now worth over 300 billion US dollars.
- At the age of just 42 Larry Page has an estimated net worth of 29.2 billion US dollars.
- Sergey Brin who is also only 42 years old and was born in Russia, has a massive net worth which Forbes estimates to be at 34.3 billion US dollars.
- In an effort to help keep Native American language alive, in 2012 Google presented users with the ability to use the Cherokee language in Gmail.
- In 2013 Google raked in an immense 55.5 billion US dollars in revenue, approximately 91% of which was generated through advertising.
- The estimated size of Google’s search index is over 100 million gigabytes.
- The worldwide usage of YouTube is monumental and more than 6 billion hours of uploaded media are watched on a monthly basis.
So now you know a little bit more about the company whose forward thinking benefits you every single day, we hope that Google keep moving forward, continuing to make technological advancements geared towards making daily life even easier for the average google user.