Internet giant Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday today. What started off as a university research project for two University of Standford students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin, changed the way the world used the internet. When Google began its official journey on September 27, 1998, very few would have believed that an internet company could change the world but it did.
Today it’s impossible to imagine our lives without the innovation introduced by Google. Google knows everything (almost) and you can know it too by a simple keyword search. However, there are some fascinating facts about this internet giant that are not known to many. So, we thought why not bring some of these fun facts to you.
Misspelt Name
The name “Google” is actually a wordplay on the mathematical term ‘googol’ which is represented by the number 1 followed by hundred zeroes. The name was chosen because the founders wanted to organise a “seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”
Started off from a rented garage
Like all the extraordinary tales in the world, Google’s journey too started off with a humble background. While the internet giant now may have offices across all the major countries in the world, it once operated from a garage in Menlo Park, California. The founder rented the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki, who now is the CEO of YouTube.
Originally named Backrub
Google’s founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally planned to name their company ‘Backrub’ after a university research project that the duo began in 1996. The duo chose Backrub as the name for the engine because the program analyzed the web’s backlinks to understand how important a website was or what other sites it was related to. However, the name was later dropped for Google.
Google owns domain names of misspelt versions of its name
Google owns multiple domain names of the misspelt version of its name such as gooogle.com, goolr.com, gogle.com.
Google Image’s Jennifer Lopez Connection
While Google was founded in 1998, it was not until July 2001 that Google Images were introduced to the world. And behind this new venture was an inspiration from a red-carpet photo of pop star Jennifer Lopez at the 2000 Grammy Awards. Lopez wore a green dress that caught the world’s attention and the Google search engine was flooded with queries about the photo. Back then it was the most popular query, but Google did not have the exact way of getting users what they exactly wanted. It inspired Google to introduce the venture of image searches on their platform.
Banned in China
Though Google owns nearly 88.6 per cent of the total search engine market in the world, it’s among the many websites that are banned by the Chinese government.
Google’s First Tweet
Google announced its arrival on microblogging site Twitter in February 2009 with a Tweet in binary. The company Tweeted, “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.” – which simply translates to “I’m feeling lucky”.
Rents Goat
It’s a very common thing to spot goat grazing grass at Google’s headquarter lawns. The company apparently hires goats from grazing the lawn instead of using grass mowers to do the job.
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