What are some amazing facts about Google ?

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Most students are happy just to get a passing grade on their research projects. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded an empire on theirs.

Google Was Originally Known As “Project BackRub”

Changing the name from Backrub to Google was probably a smart choice. Can you imagine what life would be like constantly saying “Let me just BackRub it” every time you needed to look up the answer to something?

Google Is A Multi-Billion Dollar Spelling Mistake

That’s right – Google is perhaps the biggest and most public spelling mistake ever made. Page and Brin settled on “Googol” as the name for their search engine, referring to the impossibly large number of the same name (the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros).

When it came time to register the domain name, they were delighted to find that Google.com was available. Good reason for that – until then, Google wasn’t even a real word! When they later discovered the word they’d looked up was an incorrect spelling of “googol”, they decided to roll with it anyway.

The Founders Originally Didn’t Get Along

The First Google Computer Was Made From Lego

Today, Google runs more than one million servers in data centres around the world to handle over 3.5 billon searches made internationally every day. Hard to imagine it all started with a single server built from a children’s toy!

Google’s First Chef Was A Former Caterer For ‘The Grateful Dead’

In 1999, Google’s employees (all 40 of them) held a cook-off to determine who to hire as head chef. Charlie Ayers, former caterer for American rock band, The Grateful Dead, won the competition and held the position for 7 years.

Google Was Officially ‘Verbified’

Google received one of its biggest honours when the Oxford English Dictionary officially added “Google” as a verb in 2006. Google’s influence became so widespread that “to Google” became synonymous with searching for information on the internet.

Google Was Nearly Sold For Less Than A Million Dollars

Next time you make a bad decision, spare a thought for the former CEO of internet company Excite, George Bell. When Bell was made an offer to buy Google for $1 million back in 1999, he declined. The price was knocked down to a steal at $750,000 but he still declined, saying the asking price was too high.

1. Google’s initial name was “BackRub“, referring to its underlying algorithm of checking backlinks when its founders began working on their search engine in 1995. They decided to turn its name to “Google!” in 1997.

Bell couldn’t have predicted the company he turned down would later go on to make hundreds of billions of dollars and become a global phenomenon. But as it is, Bell’s refusal has been enshrined in the history books as one of the worst business decisions ever made.

2. Google acquires its name from the word “googol“ — a mathematical term representing one followed by 100 zeros. It signifies the search engine’s capacity to offer access to the enormous information over the Internet.

Google Introduced A Search Engine That Reads Your Mind

In April of 2000, Google announced the release of “MentalPlex”, a search engine that reads your mind to determine your search results. Sounds unbelievable? Well… yeah.

Larry Page’s web page at Stanford was the first link indexed by Google.

MentalPlex was actually the first of what would become several cheeky Google hoaxes announced each year on April Fools’ Day. Other Google hoaxes have included an animal translator, a Google Maps treasure hunt, edible cable fibre and announcing Google would be forming a colony on Mars.

Given that Google is worth more than $350 billion today, the last one might not be too far off from becoming reality

Stanford University holds the patent to “PageRank“, the algorithm of Google, which is a method to measure the importance of a site. Google handed it over 1.8 million shares of its company to gain the exclusive rights of the patent.