12 interesting facts about Google

  1. Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of 8 billion web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.
  2. The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it to be kept. It was like a comfort button.
  3. 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.
  4. Google’s Orkut is most popular in Brazil and India. It was the brainchild of a Google engineer who was given free reign to run with it.
  5. The first real person that named after “Google” is a Lebanese with full name of Oliver Google Kai. He is now three years old and owns a website, which is probably run by his father Walid Elias Kai, a vertical search marketing consultant.
  6. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.
  7. Google products appear in 117 type of languages, including 5 “fake” languages like Elmer Fudd and Swedish Chef. Spanish, German, French and Japanese are the most used search language besides English.
  8. Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.
  9. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.
  10. Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.
  11. Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.
  12. The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
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