Top 10 Interesting And Lesser-Known Facts To Know

As Google turned 25, here’s a list of the top 10 interesting facts about the search engine that went on to become a tech giant.

New Delhi: Google, which has come a long way from being born as the search engine to one of the top technology companies, turned 25 on Monday. With thousands of queries being searched on Google every day, it is almost impossible now to imagine a life without the search engine. It was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Today, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globe, from YouTube and Android to Gmail and Google Search.

As Google turned 25, here’s a list of the top 10 interesting facts about the search engine that went on to become a tech giant.

1. The first version of the Google search engine was launched in August 1996 on the Stanford website.
2. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the co-founders of Google, which was originally named as Backrub. Working from their dorm rooms at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.
3. Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day (April 1) in 2004 in a wackily-worded announcement and everyone thought it was a hoax back then.
4. The full form of Google is the Global Organization of Oriented Group Language of Earth. The first office of Google was a rented garage in Santa Margarita Ave.
5. The first Google Doodle was a Burning Man stick figure. It was an ‘out-of-the-office’ message that was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to let people know that they were going to attend the Burning Man festival.
6. Backrub was later renamed Google. The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey’s mission ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’
7. Over the next few years, Google caught the attention of not only the academic community, but Silicon Valley investors as well. In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc was officially born.
8. With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee no 16 and later went on to become the CEO of YouTube). Clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table and bright blue carpet set the scene for those early days and late nights.
9. Even in the beginning, things were unconventional: from Google’s initial server (made of Lego) to the first ‘Doodle’ in 1998: a stick figure in the logo announcing to site visitors that the entire staff was playing hooky at the Burning Man Festival. ‘Don’t be evil’ captured the spirit of our intentionally unconventional methods.
10. In the years that followed, the company expanded rapidly – hiring engineers, building a sales team and introducing the first company dog, Yoshka. Google outgrew the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters (aka’The Googleplex’) in Mountain View, California.