20 things you didn’t know about Google
1. BackRub
Google was originally named BackRub. Page and Brin met at Stanford University in the summer of 1995 and decided to launch a search engine named BackRub.
Luckily, they changed their minds in 1997 and Google came into being.
2. The OG Google garage
Starting a company in a garage in California was how so many of the biggest tech companies came to be. What’s interesting about the Google garage story is that Brin and Page set up shop in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, 20 years ago.
Wojcicki has been working at Google ever since and is now the CEO of YouTube.
3. Burning Man
Google Doodle is now an iconic part of the search engine’s homepage, with over 2,000 Google Doodles being shared over the past 20 years. But do you know how this little Google nugget came to be?
When Brin and Page went off to Burning Man festival in 1998, they decided to modify the corporate logo on the homepage to indicate their whereabouts. With that, the Google Doodle was born.
4. 1 billion pages
It didn’t take Google long to become the world’s most-used search engine. In fact, the company hit this milestone on 26 June 2000, when its search index reached 1 billion pages for the first time.
5. Jennifer Lopez and Google Image Search
Google Image Search launched back in July 2001, with 250 million images.
The inspiration behind the product came from an unlikely place: Jennifer Lopez and the iconic green Versace dress she wore for the 2000 Grammy Awards.
The dress became the most popular search query on Google, but there was no way to directly see it, which led to the creation of Image Search.
6. The 9/11 attacks and Google News
Google found inspiration for its products in unsuspecting places. For instance, Google News was launched in 2002 as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York.
Google said News was an experiment in news browsing; a way to respond to people around the world who were trying to comprehend what happened, and to document the consequences.
7. Everyone thought Gmail was an April Fool’s Joke
Can you remember the days without Gmail? If you weren’t using email before 1 April 2004, probably not, as this was when Google’s email app was officially launched.
At first, everyone thought Gmail was an April Fool’s joke because it was launched on 1 April and because no one could believe Google was offering 1GB of free storage.
Gmail now has more than 1.4 billion monthly active users.
8. Google it
The verb “to google” finally made it into the US Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2006.
However, by then, Google had already found dictionary fame, as the American Dialect Society had selected “google” as its most useful word of the year back in 2002.
9. The YouTube acquisition
YouTube became part of the Google family in 2006, for a mere $1.65 billion.
Now, over 1.9 billion people use YouTube every month, with over 400 hours of video uploaded every minute.
10. 143 billion
Google Translate launched in 2006, under the catchy name of Statistical Machine Translation.
Over the past 12 years, Google Translate has become better and better. Every day, it translates 143 billion words for over 500 million people in over 100 languages.
11. Google has the world mapped
Google Maps provides driving directions in 199 countries, spanning 40 million miles of road. But, before Maps was launched, it wasn’t easy to conduct navigation online.
You had to click on arrows to move from one map tile to another, a painstakingly slow process.
The Google Maps team created AJAX, a new technology for the web that let you “drag” in a browser, which allowed them to launch moveable maps.
12. Google Chrome: next step in Google changing how we use the internet
Google Chrome celebrated its 10th birthday this year, as the official Google browser launched on 4 September 2008.
Today, there are more than two billion active Chrome browsers around the world, with one billion people using Chrome on mobile.
13. The day Google broke the internet
One day in 2009, a programmer at Google accidentally took down the internet.
The url of “/” was mistakenly added to Google’s registry of blocked websites.
As there is a “/” in nearly every single website created, it meant you couldn’t access anything online.
14. Google Search reigns supreme
Google originally launched as a search engine and it is dedicated to this role. Every year, there are trillions of searches made on Google.
What is interesting is that 15 per cent of the searches made every day are for something new that hasn’t been searched before.
15. Autocomplete is Google’s secret weapon
All that searching takes up a lot of time. That’s why Google launched Autocomplete in Search, which reduces typing by an average of 25 per cent.
Google estimates that autocomplete saves over 200 years of typing time every day.
16. Split the bill
You can do so many things in Google Search beyond simply searching for information.
For instance, searching tip calculator in Google helps you to calculate a tip for a restaurant meal. You can also ask it to help you split the bill between friends.
17. Pioneering moonshots
Google isn’t just about things like Search and Chrome. It has an in-house moonshot factory, named X, which works on some incredible projects from self-driving cars to Google Glass.
One notable project is Project Loon, launched in 2013 which provides an internet connection to remote places using balloons. A New Zealand-based sheep farmer, Charles Nimmo, became the first person in the world to connect to the balloon-powered internet.
18. The impact the Assistant is having on our lives
Since Google Assistant launched two years ago, it’s been interesting to see what its impact has been.
According to Google, women are the fastest growing user segment for the Assistant, with seniors and families, in particular, using the Assistant to help them get things done.
Before the end of 2018, the Assistant will be available in more than 30 languages and 80 countries.
19. Google runs on renewable energy
As of April 2018, Google became the first company to have achieved 100 percent renewable energy. For every kilowatt the company consumers, it creates a kilowatt of purchased renewable energy.
As well, its renewable energy projects have led to over $3 billion in new capital investment globally.
20. Building for the future
Aspects of Google’s work like X projects and renewable energy are all focused on the company’s mission to build for the next generation.
One of the ways Google does this in the UK is through its Campus London community.
Since it launched in 2012, Campus London now includes 90,000 start-ups and founder members are part of its community.
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