The world’s biggest
internet company Google is celebrating its 18th birthday, with a Doodle on the
homepage of the search engine.
Here are 13 facts
about Google you should know
1. No one knows the
birthday of Google
Concerning today's
Doodle – when is Google’s birthday? – can't be answered categorically. The
company has six birthdays, at least, and recently just decided to start
celebrating it on 27 September.
2. A T-Rex can be
found on Google's Campus, and its message is a little terrifying
There is a huge model
of a T-Rex skeleton on the company's campus, which is supposed to remind
employees not to let the company go extinct.
3. There is a T-Rex
game hidden in Google Chrome
And that's not the end
to the T-Rex. If chrome does not have an internet connection, it would show warning
information that it’s not connected and just beside it is the picture of a
dinosaur.
And if you press the
space bar while showing this, it will start a game in which you run along as
the dinosaur, jumping over obstacles by pressing the space bar. The game
doesn't end, because all of the obstacles are generated by the code. So it
keeps on generating.
4. Google was actually
not happy that its name has become popular
The company is scared
that the phrase, “just Google it” would water-down all the work it had done to
make-the brand become what it is.
5. Google buys more
other companies beyond your imagination
Estimates have put
Google’s buying habits at more than one company per week. Most of these
companies are small, but then some of them can be huge too.
Most of the products
simply get grafted into others. But some, like Android, continue to exist on
their own within Google and that happens to be its most recognizable product.
6. The “I’m Feeling
Lucky” button costs Google tens of millions of dollars per year
The button might seem
like just a bit of fun, and that’s what it mostly is. But it’s fun at a price
for Google.
By going straight
through to the first result, Google actually skips past all the advertisements
that it would usually show to people when they get up to the results page. That
means it loses advertisement income.
Google Instant means
that as long as you have it's on and your connection is fast enough, results
will start to appear as you begin to type. And Google is actually able to
gather enough information about you from your browsing history on the internet
that it can be quite sure you will come into contact with one of its ads, though
it might not be immediate.
7. Google's first ever
storage was made of Lego
Google is one of the
world’s biggest data storage companies with warehouse upon warehouse filled
with servers to store people’s work, photos, emails and details. At the very beginning,
when it was called as Backrub, its first storage was a load of hard drives
housed in Lego.
8. Google gives very
generous payouts to the husbands and wives of the workers who die on duty
They would actually
receive 50 per cent of their salary for the next decade. And their children
also receive payout until they’re grown up.
9. One search on
Google uses more computing power than it took to land the Apollo 11 astronauts
on the moon
Searching on Google is
easy and just takes milliseconds. Both the computing and networking power
needed to look through almost the entire known internet is far more huge than
the relatively minor amount of code and computing that it took to land humans
on the moon.
10. Google actually
went down once for five minutes, and took wit it 40 percent of the web traffic
On 19 August, 2013,
Google stopped working for five minutes. And it took much of the internet with
it.
While other companies
have looked to challenge Google’s dominance in search, it still represents a
huge part of the web.
Nowadays, such an
outage would be unlikely to cause such a problem – other sites, mostly
Facebook, have challenged Google’s dominance as the central linking place of
the world. But Google still accounts for a huge part of everything anyone finds
or looks at on the internet.
11. Google also hires
goats
The big Google
headquarter has lots of green. It has so much grass that it would need a lot of
lawnmowers. But Google has devised a way around that.
Instead of gas-powered
machines, Google hires a lot of goats to clear the fields around its campus.
They visit for about a
week at a time, and about 200 goats come to munch up the Google grass. The
goats do not use gas; also they don't pollute the air or make as much noise.
And they are “a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers”, Google’s employees noted.
12. There are also
dogs at Google too
Google’s office
environment is very dog friendly. It claims that allowing people bring in their
pets makes employees a lot happier.
Cats are not so
encouraged, because dogs get them upset. But they are not banned.
13. Google’s logo
wasn’t in the middle until 2001
The simplicity of the
Google homepage lies in the fact that it is one of the most viewed things in
the history of the world, so even the tiniest changes are very significant.
In its first few years
the site was around, its logo was aligned a little to the left. That stopped in
2001, when Google finally moved it into the middle.
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