Well, this weekend google celebrates its 10th birthday.
It is also launching it's new browser - "google chrome"
Here's a few facts about the search engine.
goo·gol [goo-gawl, -gol, -guh l]
–noun
a number that is equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros and expressed as 10100.
- Google's name is a play on the word googol,
which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term
was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward
Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the
Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term
reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of
information available on the web.
- Google started as a research project at
Stanford University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and
Sergey Brin
when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively (a combined
47 years old).
- Google's index of web pages is the largest in the
world, comprising of billions of web pages. Google searches
this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a
second.
- Google receives daily search requests from all
over the world, including Antarctica.
- Users can restrict their searches for content in
35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic,
Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been
received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.
- Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668
employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called
the Googleplex (Silicon Valley).
- Google translates billions of HTML web
pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld
devices, and has made it possible to enter a search using only
one phone pad keystroke per letter, instead of multiple keystrokes.
- Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet
messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or
the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.
- The basis of Google's search technology is called
PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to
each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful
it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually
named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
- Googlers are multifaceted. One operations manager,
who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon.
One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for
members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.
- Google tried to launch "google video." But sadly failed. So they bought out YouTube. Not so sad afterall.
Google - 10 years in pictures