Amazing facts about 'Google'

Written on 3:33 AM by Mrudula

• Google got its name by accident. The founders misspelled the word “googol,” which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word was chosen to reflect the company’s goal of organizing the massive amound of information that is available on the Internet.

• The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

• The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

• Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88

• 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.

• Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

• 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.

• When Google started we indexed 25,000 web pages - today we index billions. Each time we index the web it's grown by 10 to 25%.

• I'm Feeling Lucky: Google is so confident that they can deliver the goods that they've developed the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Press this button on Google's main search page after entering your search terms and you will be instantly transported to the first web page returned for your search results.

• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

• Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

• The Google home page is so sparse because the founders did not know HTML and just wanted to create a quick interface.

• Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

• Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.

• At first, there was not even a “submit” button. Users had to hit the “return” key to generate a Google search.

• Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

• iGoogle was our fastest growing product last year (2006). People have personalized their iGoogle homepages with over 10,000 free gadgets.

• Google's Cache: Google's cache feature makes it possible for you to see a webpage as it might have looked a few upgrades ago. This is a godsend for anyone who might be looking for a now defunct company's site, or a webmaster that has had a computer mishap and needs original source code. Google's cache feature also highlights your search term on the cached page snapshot. I personally love this feature because it lets me view older versions of sites that I need information from.

• As the web grows, search becomes more important. It's like a library - the bigger the library, the more important the index.

• Google’s search technology is called PageRank (tm). It assigns an “importance” value to each page on the Web and gives it a rank. But that is not why the technnology is called PageRank. In fact, it is named after Google co-founder Larry page.

• Google’s traffic doubled when they introduced their “Did you mean…” feature. This feature was made possible by a much-improved spell checker.

• PageRank: Not originally meant to specify "web pages". The "page" part of PageRank was named for Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a system for ranking web pages according to link popularity and text-matching. So, if there's a great site out there with excellent content and a lot of people have linked to it (plus it matches your search terms), than Google will deliver it to you in the top 10, and it will have a high "PageRank."

• Google users apparently never feel “lucky,” since the “I feel lucky” is almost never used. However, in trials it was discovered that users saw it as a comfort button and did not want it removed.

• 20 to 25% of Google queries have never been searched before.

• Brin and Page would hang out at the Stanford computer science department’s loading docks in hopes of borrowing newly-arrived PCs to use in their network.

• Google’s first data center was Larry Page’s dorm room.

• When Page and Brin tried to find buyers to license their search technology, one portal CEO told them “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”

• Google's PageRank algorithm uses more than 200 signals to determine the rank of a website.

• The first major investor Andy Bechtolsheim on of the founders of Sun Microsystems wrote a check for $100,00 after seeing a quick demo. At first, there was no way to deposit the $100,000 check. It was made out to “Google Inc.,” but there was no legal entity with that name. The check sat in Page’s desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin rushed to set up a corporation and locate other investors.

- Munnu

Posted in Amazing Facts |

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