Google @23; Here’re some crazy facts about search engine giant

Bhubaneswar: The search engine giant Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday on Monday with an animated chocolate cake on its homepage.

The animated doodle features a cake with ’23’ written on top of it with a birthday candle substituting for ‘L’ in ‘Google’.

“Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same,” Google wrote in a bio accompanying the Doodle.

Google had started operation in the year 1998 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two researchers at Stanford University, California.

The domain of google.com was registered on September 15, 1995. Page and Brin registered Google as a company on September 4, 1998.

Sundar Pichai took over Google’s leadership on October 24, 2015. Over the years, the search engine has expanded its services.

Here’re some crazy facts you might not have known about Google:

1. Google was originally named BackRub

Page and Brin had named their research project as BackRub – a web crawler concept – in the year 1996 before calling it Google. It was on servers of Stanford University for more than a year.

2. Google or ‘googol’?

The search engine got the name Google from the mathematical term ‘googol’ which refers to numerical one followed by 100 zeros. Many still wonders if Google was a misspelling of Googol.

3. Google first operated its office in a rented garage

In September 1998, the founders set up office of Google in a garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki on rent in Menlo Park, California. Currently, Susan is the CEO of YouTube. The company was running from the garage for six months.

4. “Don’t be evil”: Google’s unofficial motto

“Don’t be evil” was said to be company’s corporate code of conduct. However, the phrase was removed in 2018.

5. Charlie Ayers, Google’s caterer

Charlie Ayers initially cooked for the Grateful Dead, a Rock band, in exchange for free admission to their shows. Later, he became caterer of Google and eventually served 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafes throughout its Mountain View, California.

6. Swedish Chef lingo preference in Google search

In 2001, Google opened gates for search queries and results in Swedish Chef lingo (called Bork Bork Bork, to be technical).

7. Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day

Google unveiled Gmail on April Fool’s Day in 2004. Now, it serves millions of users across the world every day.

8. Leaders of Google worked together for long haul

Before the company went public in 2004, Eric Schmidt, the then CEO of Google and currently the executive chairman of Alphabet, and Google’s founders worked altogether for 20 years.

9. Google used as verb on TV show

An instance of Google being used a verb — “to Google” something was found in an episode of TV series “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” on October 15, 2002.

10. Many languages but one search engine

Google speaks many languages. In 2000, Google was available to public in 10 foreign languages such as — French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.

 

 

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