Google wasn’t always the world’s third most valuable brand. Long before it was
a go-to verb, it was an obedient digital dog, merely finding and retrieving
stuff, playing fetch for Internet users over and over again.
Eventually the little G -- which started in 1995
as a Stanford University Ph.D. research project -- grew into the big, $367
billion-dollar G we know and love-hate today. No longer satisfied to fetch
links alone, the global tech colossus now chases meatier, more meaningful
bones, like nailing the fastest Internet speeds on the planet, rendering human
drivers obsolete and, NBD, ending death.
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Page and Sergey Brin
The Mountain View mammoth’s meteoric rise to the
top is chock full of juicy trivia tidbits and mind-blowing milestones along the
way.
Here are 11 surprising facts about Google:
1. Sergey Brin and Larry (Lawrence) Page met by chance.
Page, 22 at the time, having recently earned a computer
engineering degree from the University of Michigan, considers attending
Stanford University for his Ph.D. Brin, then 21, already a Ph.D. candidate at
the prestigious institution, is assigned to show Page around campus. That was
back in 1995 and, as fate would have it, quite the momentous meeting of the
minds.
2. Google was originally named BackRub.
In 1996, Page and Brin collaborate on a
pioneering "web crawler” concept
curiously called BackRub. Some speculate that the early search engine’s
nomenclature was a nod to retrieving backlinks. BackRub, which linked to Brin’s and Page’s 90s-tastic
original homepages, lived on Stanford’s servers for more than a year, but
eventually chews up too much bandwidth.
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3. Google is a play on the word "googol.”
On Sept. 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, Page
and Brin register the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google, a
twist on "googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed
by 100 zeros. The name hints at the seemingly infinite amount of data the
brainy pair code their fledgling search engine to mine, make sense of and
deliver. Many still wonder if Google is a misspelling of Googol.
4. Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man stick figure.
The inaugural doodle was
an out-of-the-office message that Page and Brin created in August of 1998 to
let people know they’d shipped off to the Burning Man festival. The future
billionaires positioned the iconic Man behind the second "o” in Google’s logo.
Dude, check it out here.
Related: Lessons
From Burning Man on How to Unlock Creativity and Think Big
5. Google’s first office was a rented garage.
So stereotypical Silicon Valley startup, right?
Starting in September 1998, the company’s first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa
Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, Calif. Wojcicki, sister of 23andMe founder Anne
Wojcicki, is Google employee no. 16. She was Google’s
first marketing manager and is now the CEO
of YouTube. As for the house that built Google, the tech titan bought it, because of
course it did. Then it filled the suburban ranch-style dwelling with candy,
snacks and lava lamps.
6. A former caterer for The Grateful Dead was Google’s first chef.
In 1999, chef Charlie Ayers won a cook-off judged by Google’s
employees, then only 40 in all, to clinch the position, which he held for seven
years. Ayers initially cooked for the Grateful Dead in exchange for free
admission to their legendary shows, but later took over catering for the jam
band. At Google, he eventually served 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10
cafés throughout its Mountain View, Calif. global headquarters.
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Brin's Best Advice to Marissa Mayer
7. Google New York began at a Starbucks on 86th Street.
In 2000, Google unofficially kicked off its New York arm at a Starbucks in New York
City. It was helmed by a one-person sales "team.” Now, thousands of "NYooglers”
clock-in at its swanky, 2.9 million-square-foot New York office, a former Port
Authority building on 111 Eighth Avenue.
8. Swedish Chef is a language preference in Google search.
Gurndy morn-dee burn-dee, who knew? Yes, it’s
true. In 2001, Google got in touch with its inner yodelling Muppet and opened
the gates for search queries and results in Swedish Chef lingo (called Bork
Bork Bork, to be technical). Other "joke” languages you can tickle Google’s
algorithm with include: Elmer Fudd, Pirate, Klingon, Pig Latin and, of course,
Hacker (a.k.a. 1337sp34k).
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Ready for 'Buy' Buttons in Google Search Results
9. Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day, no joke.
Toying with Silicon Valley’s longstanding
tradition of pulling April Fool’s Day pranks, Google unveiled Gmail on April 1,
2004, in a wackily-worded announcement that was widely misconstrued as a hoax.
It wasn’t Google Gulp. It was a brilliant double fake
and the precursor to a Google staple that now serves millions of users across
the world every day.
10. Googlers ride colorful "gBikes” around the Googleplex.
Launched in 2007, Google’s Googleplex campus commuter
bike program began as a modest fleet of bright blue Huffys. Then came the goofy "clown bikes.” Now
Googlers ride more than 1,000 primary-colored, basket-equipped beach cruisers,
dubbed "gBikes,” around the two-mile expanse that is Google Mountain View.
Interestingly, none of the bikes have locks. Employees simply "borrow” the
nearest set of wheels. When they’re done, they drop them off conveniently close
to office entryways for other Googlers to use.
11. Google negotiated its acquisition of YouTube’s at Denny’s over
mozzarella sticks.
"We didn’t want to meet at offices,” YouTube
co-founder Steven Chen said, "so we were like,
‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’” That place turned out to be a
Denny’s in Palo Alto, Calif. Mozzarella sticks were nibbled, hands were shaken.
The 2006 landmark acquisition was a Grand Slam for Chen and co-founders Jawed
Karim and Chad Hurley. Not bad for the time. Google doled out $1.65 billion
for what would explode into the Internet’s most-watched -- and most uploaded-to
-- video platform.
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Fearless and Fed Up