1. Google was originally called BackRub. The
homepage read: “BackRub is a ‘web crawler’ which is designed to traverse the
web.”
2. The first Google doodle was a Burning Man
symbol. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to the Burning Man festival in
1998 and added the doodle to let users know they were away from the office that
weekend.
3. Google hired its first in-house chef, Charlie
Ayers, in November 1999, when the company had just 40 employees.
4. Google has acquired an average of one company
every week since 2010.
5. Ayers went on to become the firm’s executive
chef, overseeing a team of 150 employees across 10 cafes at its headquarters in
Mountain View, California.
6. You can use Gmail in more than 50 languages.
These include: Welsh, Basque, Tagalog, Malayalam, Telugu and Cherokee.
7. Around 1,000 of Google’s employees became
millionaires when the company went public in 2004.
8. One of those millionaires was masseuse Bonnie
Brown, who worked at the company giving back rubs for $450 a week back in 1999.
9. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which bypasses
the results page to take users directly to the first result of their search,
has been estimated to cost Google around $100m in lost ad revenue every year.
10. Google hires goats. In 2009, the company rented
around 200 goats for a week to eat the grass and fertilize the soil
at its California headquarters.
11. Google’s first official tweet was the words
“I’m feeling lucky” in binary.
12. Almost all of rival company Mozilla’s money
comes from Google. The firm pays $300m a year to be the default search engine
on Mozilla’s web browser Firefox.
13. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own
just 16% of the company.
14. That 16% gives them a combined net worth of
around $46bn.
15. A new Google employee is known
as a “Noogler” and a former employee is referred to as a “Xoogler”.
Wink buzz: About 40% of the marketers report that GOOGLE+ is
useful for their business
