[vc_row parallax=”” parallax_image=”” inner_container=”” no_margin=”true” padding_top=”0px” padding_bottom=”0px” border=”none” marginless_columns=””][vc_column fade=”” fade_animation=”in” fade_animation_offset=”45px” width=”1/1″][text_output]Google is hands down the most popular search engine in the world. Even in China or Russia, where Google is not the primary search engine, you will seldom find, if at all, Internet users who have never heard of or used Google. The search giant handles upwards from 3 billion searches a day. If that is not mind-blowing, what is?
Care for some more interesting facts about Google and its nifty search engine? Cool! Let’s get started.
Seven stunning facts about Google you probably did not know
Think you could use a Backrub?
It would be the same as using Google! “Backrub” is the original name of Google, which stemmed from its use of backlinks for the purpose of finding and ranking web pages. Here’s another interesting fact – The final name the company stuck with, Google, was a misspelling!
Popular accounts reveal that the intended name was “Googol”, a mathematical term, which was misspelled by investors and according to another story, by a fellow student at Stanford, resulting in the birth of the now ubiquitous name Google.
The time when Yahoo! could have had Google
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not want to run a business. They wanted to sell their search-engine idea and were looking for buyers. Yahoo! declined initially and was back in 2002 with a $3 billion buy-out offer. Interestingly enough, Google refused this time.
Quick – take a guess at Google’s value today? A whopping $400 billion!
The time when Google featured its first Doodle
Way back in 1998, when the founding duo decided to head to Nevada for the Burning Man festival, they designed an unusual out-of-office message, which as you may have guessed it by now, was the first Doodle ever on Google.
The Doodle comprised a man standing behind Google’s second ‘O’, letting the users know that the founders were away for some time and wouldn’t be able to fix technical problems during that time.
The time when Google launched a function to read minds
Back in 2000, Google launched the MentalPlex – next generation search function, which included the first-ever mind-reading capability! Exciting, no? Wait until you learn more. MentalPlex was the first in Google’s long list of vivid April Fool’s jokes that have caught poor, unsuspecting users off-guard for over a decade now! So now you know the tradition of Google fooling you annually began in the April of 2000.
Farmville at Google
Googleplex, the corporate headquarters of Google, has 200 goats rented every month to “naturally mow” the bushes and weeds around it. It allows Googlers (employees) and Nooglers (new employees) to bring their dogs (friendlier ones who have an active bladder as well) to work as well. How great is that?
Also, Googleplex is also known for its odd decorations. There are pink flamingos, Android statues, Google-colored phone boxes and ball pits for adults. Furthermore, there’s a large Lego figure, and there’s Stan, Google’s T-Rex.
KISS and Google
KISS is a popular acronym in web designing, which encourages a designer to “keep it simple silly”. Bet you did not know why the Google homepage is so simple and minimalistic. Founders Page and Brin lacked sufficient HTML know-how to be able to do up their homepage at the time of launch, so they kept it simple.
Also, they could not design a Submit button for searches, which is why Google relied on users hitting the return key on their keyboards to launch a search. Moreover, while we are talking of homepages, here is another interesting thing you probably didn’t know. If you were to time travel to 1998 and view the Google homepage, you would find it similar to Yahoo! in one striking aspect, the use of the exclamation point. In 1998, Google used ‘!’ on its homepage as well.
And finally, the time when Google showed “things are only impossible until they are not.”
Ah! You already know where the quote comes from, don’t you? Yes, Star Trek! Who could have thought one day you could look-up something on the Internet using a language from the Star Trek universe? Well, Google’s made it possible!
The Klingons, you and other Earthlings who know and understand the language Klingon can make it their language interface option of choice. No kidding! In 2002, Google added Klingon as an accepted language.[/text_output][/vc_column][/vc_row]
