Google Inc. was incorporated as a privately held company in September 1998 and they had their IPO in August 2004. They have been the largest search engine company since then. It is estimated that Google runs over 1 million servers in data centers across the world and processes over one billion search requests per day. Whether we like it or not, we depend on Google and they depend on us. Here are some interesting facts that you may not know about the company.
Google Used To Be Named BackRub
When Google was formed, the founders accidentally misspelled the word “googol,” which is a word that refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word “googol” was chosen because the goal of the company was to organize massive amounts of information. In an article from the BusinessInsider earlier this month, we learned that Google co-founder and current CEO Larry Page was obsessed with the number googol even while attending East Lansing High School in Michigan. The original name of Google was BackRub, but they renamed it to Google in 1997.
Google Is Minimal Because The Founders Did Not Know HTML Back Then
Google’s homepage has been known for its simplicity. The simplicity and minimal design is one of the major reasons why Google became more popular than their competitors like MSN, Yahoo!, and AltaVista. The minimal design was actually created because of the limited knowledge that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had of HTML. As a matter of fact, there was not even a “submit” button on the homepage at first. Users had to hit the “return” key to see Google search results.
Google’s First Doodle
Google’s first homepage “Doodle” are very well known. Each doodle represents a significant event for a given day. For example, the Google doodle may have eggs used as the O’s in the word “Google” on Easter Sunday. The first “Google doodle” had a picture of a man with his arms sticking up. This was used during the weekend Larry and Sergey took the weekend off to go to the Burning Man festival in NEvada. The Burning Man was added to the homepage to let users know they were out of the office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash that weekend.
I’m Feeling Lucky
Google users almost never use the “I’m feeling lucky” button, but trials of removing the button made people feel uncomfortable. People did not like seeing the button removed.
Google IPO: $2,718,281,828
When Google filed their form S-1 registration statement, they wrote the proposed maximum aggregate offering price at $2,718,281,828. That is a very specific number. How did Google come up with it? That number happens to be the first ten digits of the math constant e. You can tell that even when the founders were getting ready to take their company to the next level, they still had a sense of nerdy, yet witty sense of humor.
Google Storage (LEGO)
In 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students at Stanford, they were working on the Digital Library Project. They needed a large amount of disk space to test the PageRank algorithm on world wide web data. At the time of their research, the largest hard drive sizes were 4 gigabytes so they assembled 10 of them into a low-cost cabinet made out of Lego. Two years later, the company had 5,000 PCs for searching and web crawling using LINUX.
Andy Bechtolsheim
The first major investor in Google was Andy Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim was one of the founders in Sun Microsystems. He wrote Sergey and Larry a $100,000 check after seeing a quick demo on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s house in Palo Alto. The check was written to Google Inc. Google was not a legal entity at that point and so the check sat in Larry’s desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin quickly rushed to set up a corporation and find other investors.
YouTube Deal At Denny’s
The $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube took place in one week. YouTube co-founder Steve Chen met with executives at both Google and Yahoo! They did not want to meet at offices so they decided to meet over mozzarella sticks at Denny’s in Palo Alto. Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang came to one of those meetings. Google ended up outbidding Yahoo! for YouTube.
Google Goats
Google rents goats from a company called California Grazing. The goats help Google cut down on the amount of weed at the Google headquarters. Google rents 200 goats plus the herder and a border collie to cut the weeds. Google said it is “a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”
Larry and Sergey Wanted Steve Jobs As CEO In 2000
Back in 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to hire Steve Jobs as the company CEO before deciding to go with Eric Schmidt. Google’s investors said that they needed supervision with an experienced CEO. Jobs was too busy building the iPod at Apple at the time though. Eventually John Doerr convinced the two to hire former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt.
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