20 Amazing Facts About Google

Google is not just another search engine, which makes the information universally accessible to all. There are a lot on interesting facts about Google, which makes this search engine brilliant.

Here are some Interesting Facts about Google

1. Google got its name accidentally, Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number one 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. Also the company that gave them their first Paycheck spelled it incorrectly and hence they had to register on the name which then went on to become ‘Google’.

2. 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

3. Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML

4. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centres around the world

5. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

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

7. Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. 

     Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

8. Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88

9. Google employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

10. 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.

11. They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.

12. Google earns around 20 million dollars per day from Adwords alone.

13 .There are no restrictions on Googler’s dress code in the office, in which pajama, ugly sweater and even super hero costume were on the records.

14. Google indexes more than 3 billion webpages .

15. Google just takes 0.5 seconds to search from its large database of billions of records .

Controversial facts about Google

16. For all searches Google record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as “IP delivery based on geolocation.”

17. Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.

18.Google’s toolbar is spyware:With the advanced features enabled, Google’s free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that’s only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google’s toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day).

19. Google indexes everything about a website, even some passwords files . That’s why it is considered as a useful tool by hackers

20. Google always leaves a cookie on your hard drive . Which is used to gather information about you.

 

There he is, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google

     Google's headquarters is located in Mountainview, Calif., but it might as well be Mount Olympus given the company's wild success and seemingly unending acquisition spree. The Google search engine, which handled 70 percent of all online requests at the time we wrote this, is just the tip of a rapidly expanding empire. Over the years, Google has introduced a suite of innovative applications and services, ranging from Gmail and Google Apps to AdWords and AdSense. The company also has ventured into the smartphone fray (and is no doubt hatching new plans as we write). No wonder the company's stock consistently sells for $600 a share or higher on the Nasdaq exchange.

     What's astounding is not the level of success the company has achieved, but the timeline in which it has done it. IBM history dates back to 1911, Microsoft and Apple to the mid-1970s. Google doesn't have to look back nearly so far. All things Google began in 1995. That's when Sergey Brin, a 21-year-old student at Stanford University, took University of Michigan graduate Larry Page, just a year older, on a tour of the campus. Legend has it that the two disliked each other and bickered the entire tour. But it must not have been a complete disaster because Page enrolled in Stanford and began working to fulfill the requirements of his Ph.D. program in computer sciences.

     Page considered several topics for his doctoral thesis but finally settled on the World Wide Web, which, although growing in the mid-1990s, was still little more than a curiosity. Page decided to focus his attention on the link structure of the Web. Was it possible, hewondered, to use links between Web pages to rank their relative importance? And, if this was indeed possible, could he develop an algorithm -- a set of mathematical rules -- to count and qualify every back link on the Web?

     By 1996, Page was knee-deep in the project, but the complexity of the math proved challenging. He reached out to Brin, the outspoken grad student who first introduced Page to the Stanford campus. Brin began working with Page to further refine and develop the math, so that links pointing to a site could be ranked according to importance. They named the resulting algorithm PageRank and then inserted it into BackRub, a search engine that started crawling the Web, beginning with Stanford's home page and working outward from there, across the 10 million online pages that existed at the time.

Partners in PageRank: Page, Brin and Stanford

     A year after incorporating the algorithm into BackRub, the two students knew they were onto something big. The search results they were getting from BackRub were far superior to results being produced by existing search engines, in their opinion. Not only that, Page and Brin realized that as the Web grew, their results would only get better -- because a growing number of Internet pages meant more links and greater resolution in determining what was relevant and what wasn't. They decided to change the name of BackRub to something that better reflected the massive scale of their project. They settled on Google, after "googol," the term used to describe the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

     Although the Google brand name might be interesting or even innovative, it's the PageRank algorithm that forms the company's foundation. On Jan. 9, 1998, Page and Brin filed for a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Patent number 6,285,999, "Method for node ranking in a linked database," lists Larry Page as the inventor and the assignee as Stanford University. What does that mean? It means Stanford actually owns the patent for the page-ranking process -- Page and Brin license the use of the PageRank algorithm in their commercial endeavour.

     Not that the algorithm has remained unchanged since those heady days of the dot-com frenzy. In 2001, Google turned over the code to Amit Singhal, who had come to the company from AT&T Labs only a year before. Singhal rewrote the algorithm so that the Google search engine could incorporate additional ranking criteria more easily. Could this be considered a reinvention? Perhaps, but if that's the case, then the Google search engine is being reinvented constantly. For example, in 2007, the company introduced universal search -- the ability to get links to any medium on the same results page. All told, Google owns hundreds of patents related to the mathematical processes used to generate more effective search results.

     Then there's the non-search-engine side of Google -- things like Gmail, AdWords, AdSense and Google Voice. These innovations come from Google's team of engineers. Not all of their ideas pan out, but a few, like Google News, the brainchild of Google Chief Scientist Krishna Bharat, are home runs.

     So, when thinking about the invention of Google, it's helpful to consider a two-part answer. The inventor of the Google search engine was Larry Page, with a key assist by Sergey Brin. But the multifaceted, multinational company we know today is the product of a team of brilliant engineers. Of course, every idea eventually must make it past Page and Brin, the greek gods who have built one of the most successful technology brands -- and one of the most compelling mythologies -- in the history of business.