Google Fun Facts

Google Fun Facts

Google sorts billions of bits of information for its users. Here are some little-known bits of information about Google:

• Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.



• Google started as a research project at Stanford University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively (a combined 47 years old).



• Google's index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of billions of web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.



• Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.
  


• Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.
  


• Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.



• Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices, and has made it possible to enter a search using only one phone pad keystroke per letter, instead of multiple keystrokes.



• Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.



• The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.



• Googlers are multifaceted. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.
  


• 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.
  


• Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne
  

Very Funny & Interesting Facts

1. Swedish fish is the first (on the list) take-away snacks Google orders to its office.

2. Google celebrates Halloween every year in the office. The funniest dress-up was lava lamp in 2007, which I can’t visualize how it looks like though.

3. There are no restrictions on Googlers dress code in the office, in which pajama, ugly sweater and even super hero costume were on the records.

4. The youngest Google employee was 7 years old. (Not sure about this, the only thing searchable from the web was a 15 years old.

5. 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.

6. The first real person that named after “Google” is a Lebanese with full name of Oliver Google Kai. He is now three years old and owns a website(!?), which is probably run by his father Walid Elias Kai, a vertical search marketing consultant.

7. 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.

8. Thinking of working in Google? Well, think again if you can’t answer their mysterious and challenging puzzles. Google setup a billboard in Silicon Valley by 2004, stating “First 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e”. Geeks who got the hint would have visited http://www.7427466391.com/ (which is not available now) with further puzzles to be solved before they were recruited.

9. “Teaching is like learning again”. Since 2000, Google encourage teaching and learning activities among its employees, from the subject of learning Chinese to Ulysses from Greek mythology.

10. Google has a tradition of perpetrating April Fools’ Day hoaxes. In 2008 alone, 16 hoaxes are created by Google worldwide. The most memorable one though was the Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider) in 2007.