This is a random list of 20 things I found fascinating about Google that you may not know.  It’s the 2nd in a series I’m writing after I recently read the book; Steven Levy’s “In The Plex” – How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.  I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Google Home Page 1998

Here we go!

  1. As early as 1999 there were 80 computers used just to crawl and index the web and 3000 computers already in use by Google.
  2. “Googleplex” (the term Google uses to describe it’s corporate headquarters) is a portmanteau of Google and complex, and a reference to googolplex, the name given to an unthinkably large number.
  3. Google learned that buying cheap computers and planning for their failure was a more efficient way to do business versus buying high end, top of the line systems.
  4. Early on Google found the available operating systems (like Windows or Linux) file systems in use inadequate and developed their own self replicating file system.
  5. One of their early failures involved teaching the search engine the difference between a hot dog and a boiling puppy!
  6. One of the ways the search engine “learns” is to read the words around other words so it creates associations like bread and mustard with hot dogs, not roasting puppy fur.
  7. One of the biggest challenges Google had was with names. To solve that problem they licensed the white pages database and used it to create a system that recognized what a name was.
  8. One third of all search queries are “virgin requests” meaning they have never been entered in the search box before
  9. The book suggests Google uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify if images contain text (I see all the SEO’s eye brows going up with this one)
  10. Matt Cutts (who now leads the web spam team) had his first contact with Google in 1999 while he was in the middle of writing his thesis.  He called them and asked what they pay their engineers. They were not willing to share that information of course.  A couple days later, Google must have been Googling Matt and called him in for an interview.
  11. Every search engineer at Google has exclusive use of a set of servers that store an index of the ENTIRE web.
  12. One way Google solved a failed query for “running shoes” (it kept returning a stone gnome sculpture wearing running shoes that was for sale)  was one of the engineers working on it bought the sculpture and brought it to work! The gnome was no longer in the results and after that the query was returning accurate results.
  13. Early on Google identified it’s language translation goals  at 20 language pairs.  (each can translate to the other).  Today Google has 506 language pairs!
  14. One paragraph suggests there are over a million servers in Google’s data centers.
  15. Back in 2001 Larry Page said the future of Google search is that it will be included in everyone’s brain. “If you think about something and don’t know much about it you will automatically get information.”
  16. By 2002 Google was making over 185 million dollars in profit (not revenue). According to Wikipedia it was 8.5 billion in 2010
  17. Google’s mission is “To organize the worlds information, making it universally accessible and useful.” (think about that statement)
  18. The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin believed they could build a company without marketing.
  19. When Google was looking for a CEO, the one and only person they met with that they felt fit the bill was non other than Steve Jobs (of Apple). Eventually they chose Eric Schmidt, then CTO (chief technology officer) for Sun Microsystems.
  20. And finally, the first version of the Google search engine was called “Back Rub“.

Do you know something interesting about Google you would like to share?  Please leave it in the comments below and please share this post with anyone you think may find it interesting.  Also, be sure to subscribe to our blog over there on the right and get our future posts.