Some interesting facts about Google

1) Google started its hiring process by recruiting Craig Silverstein as their first employee, without their current sophisticated HR team. Craig was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s fellow student at Stanford. (Craig was third employee of Google. He has now resigned from Google and has joined Khan Academy, an online learning site offering collaborative videos and projects.)

2) Google processes around 20 petabytes (1 peta byte = 10^15 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information daily, which is an unbelievable number to put your mind around. The number suggests that approximately almost every person using the Internet uses Google at least once.

3) The Googleville data center uses enough electricity to power 82,000 homes.

4) The name Google was actually a spelling mistake, it was supposed to be ‘Googol’.

5) Google employees are allowed to devote 20% of their time to personal projects.

6) When Google first started, it indexed just 25,000 web pages but Google now indexes billions of web pages.

7) The Google home page has over 30 validation errors.

8) 37% of all Google staff are in sales/marketing.

9) Google has the world’s largest network of translators. Google employs the largest number of people who help transcend the world’s boundaries. You can translate from 345 source language to 345 target languages from this network.

10) It is estimated that Google consists of around 900,000 servers, which are located in various data centers around the world. These servers are placed in high security modern buildings (data centers) to ensure data safety.

11) Google’s first office was set up in a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki in 1998.

12) The first Google ‘company dog’ was a Leonberger breed called ‘Yoshka’.

13) The Googleville data center uses enough electricity to power 82,000 homes.

14) It costs Google 1kJ of energy every time a search query is processed.

15) The Googleplex has a rooftop full of solar panels that generate 4,475 kWh daily.

16) A Google trike has been designed to take images in places inaccessible by car.

17) The basic aim of Google is to connect the world with the Internet.

18) New features in Google are only kept if 20% or more people use them.

19) The name Google was actually a spelling mistake, it was supposed to be ‘Googol’.

20) Google employees are allowed to devote 20% of their time to personal projects.

21) it When Google first started, it indexed just 25,000 web pages.

22) Google uses over 200 ‘signals’ to rank a website.

23) Many Google employees have experience in high security fields such as the National Security Agency.

24) The Google toolbar updates automatically with new versions.

25) The only way to prevent your website being cached on Google is to add a robots meta tag with the ‘noarchive’ attribute on each page.

26) Google has a 75% monopoly on all external referrals to the most websites.

27) Google Page Rank was named after Larry Page, one of the Google founders.

28) The Google home page has over 30 validation errors.

29) The Google search engine can process over a billion requests every day.

30) The Google homepage copyright message was added to show people the page had loaded fully.