10 Facts about Google

I haven’t posted anything for a while so I thought I would ease in with something fun. Lots of us rely on Google for business either as an SEO agency, affiliate marketer or something else. But I bet you didn’t know just how interesting Google is. Below are 10 interesting facts about Google, well what I find interesting anyway. In no particular order.

10. Everyone knows Google started primarily as a research project to discover the link structure of the Internet. But did you know Google started way back in 1996 as a research project called “BackRub”.

9. Google started quite humbly but still with innovation at the forefront of everything it did. Sergey Brinn and Larry Page needed a flexible solution to store their hard drives which amounted to a hefty 40GB. They came to the conclusion that Lego was the perfect storage device. Below is a picture of the Lego in Stanford University.

8. I like this one the search giant actually rents a herd of 200 goats and a couple of shepherds as weed killers. They say they look far more friendly than lawn mowers and are more eco-friendly too. And I’d have to agree with them on that one.

7. Google’s first investor was Sun Systems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who after having a 30 minute conversation with Larry and Sergey wrote them a check for $100,000. The thing is Google didn’t even officially exist at the time and was not even registered as a company. Andy must have had a lot of faith or more money than sense. Either way I’d say he made a pretty good investment decision.

6. This surprised me. You know the “I’m feeling lucky” button on Google’s homepage, well that costs them over 100 million dollars every year. This is because it bypasses the SERPs which show sponsored listings. They believe it makes them seem less corporate and detracted from their users.

5. In the early days it used a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki as its base of operations. They rented it in 1998 for $1,700 per month. They later gave her a job which led to a high level executive position, she also met her husband at the company and later had kids, and all in all it was a pretty profitable tenancy for Susan. The house was later bought by Google as a sort of shrine to their beginnings.

4. It has been calculated that a single search query uses about 1kJ of power. This is apparently less energy than your PC uses in the same amount of time as it takes Google to bring up the results.

3. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. It was actually a spelling mistake for the term ‘Googol’, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was originally coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner.

2. Google has more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex which is based in California.

1. Sergey and Larry were both under 25 when they started Google and were billionaires before they were 30. Now that’s something to aspire to.