21 Interesting Facts About Google.com

Google is everyone favorite search engine and I’m not sure how many of you really know history behind Google. Here are some interesting facts about Google search engine, which you would love to know.

• Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.
• Googol is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.
• The name Google™ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ˜Googol™”.
• Google consists of over 450,000 servers,  racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.
• When Serge Brin and Larry Page were born, Bill Gates had a nervous breakdown.
• Atlantis, Shakespeare’s unknown diaries and Mozart’s unreleased album were found using Google.
• The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button 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.
• Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handled devices.
• 57% of American kids say ‘Google’ as their first word.
• 620 million visitors visit Google.com daily.
• 97% of Google Revenue comes from their advertising services.
• Google processes 20 Petabyte of information daily.
• As of December 2009, Google’s assets were valued at $40.5 billion.
• Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.
• 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.
• All the letters used in the ‘Google’ word are copyrighted by Google. According to forecasts, Google will buy rights for other letters soon (which made Chinese and Japanese very happy). The company name won’t change, though.
• When Google started it indexed 25,000 web pages. Today Google indexes billions of web pages and each time it grows by 10-25%.
• According to Google “As the web grows search becomes more and more important”. It acts like a library , the bigger the library the more important is the index.
• The biggest break in search came when Google introduced their improved spell checker seen as “Did you mean ? ”.This feature doubled their traffic and soon the developers discovered that the ideal placement was at the bottom of the search results.
• Every now and then Google makes small changes and test them with a given set of users. The users aren’t told of this. They are presented with a new interface and the testers observe how the users react to it.
• There isn’t any restriction for proper dress code in the Google office. This may include pajamas and even super hero costumes.