Google Facts: Amazing Trivia about Google

In its capacity of being the world’s most popular search engine, Google rules the Internet. One of the most recognized brands on Earth, Google has a massive list of interesting facts, figures and statistics. There can be thousands of questions like “Did you know this about Google?” and “What are the facts about Google?”. I have written several articles containing trivia information, like on Facebook, YouTube, Steve Job etc.; but this one on Google Facts is the most interesting one. While doing research for information, I also got amazed so many times. Now it’s your turn. Come and learn these jaw dropping facts about world’s largest search engine —the Google!

1. Google History Facts
2. Facts about Google Logo Creator
3. Facts about Google Logo
4. Google Doodle Facts
5. Facts on Google, the company
6. Google Search Engine Facts
7. Google Products Facts

The largest collection of interesting facts about Google.

1. Google was actually founded on September 4, 1998 [tweet]
2. Google changed its birthday to 27 September in 2005 —when it announced it was indexing record number of pages. [tweet]
3. The term Google is a misspelling of the word ‘Googol‘ (which is a huge number; 1 followed by 100 zeros) [tweet]
4. Google’s precursor was a search engine called BackRub, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. [tweet]
5. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met at Stanford University in 1995. In 1996 they began work on a search engine called “BackRub”. [tweet]
6. Since 2012, on average, Google has acquired more than one company every week. [tweet]

1. Ruth Kedar designed the current Google Logo. [tweet]
2. Ruth was approached by Larry Page and Sergey Bring to design both Google logo and website. [tweet]
3. Ruth Kedar deliberately did not follow the cyclic repetition of colors in Google logo to mark unconventional approach of Google. [tweet]
4. Earlier Ruth Kedar chose Times Roman font for Google logo. But finally she decided to use Catull font. [tweet]
5. It was Ruth Kedar who chose red, blue, green and yellow colors for Google logo. [tweet]
6. Ruth Kedar, the maker of Google Logo, runs a design agency named Kedar Designs. [tweet]

1. To mark a major tragedy, Google sometimes shows a colorless, white logo instead of the standard colored logo. [tweet]
2. From May 1999 to May 29, 2008 Google’s favicon used an uppercase “G” letter. [tweet]
3. From 2008 onwards, Google’s favicon show has been showing a small-case letter “g”. [tweet]
4. The very first Google logo was created by Sergey Brin using GIMP graphic editing program. [tweet]

1. First doodle (a graphic to replace Google’s official logo on search engine’s home page) was the Burning Man. [tweet]
2. The Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada in the United States, in 1998. [tweet]
3. Page and Brin created this Burning Man doodle to tell Google users that they were going to attend this event. [tweet]
4. Dennis Hwang is the man who designs most of the Google Doodles. He is a graphic artist employed by Google. [tweet]
5. Dennis Hwang designed the first doodle logo on the Bastille Day, July 14, 2000, at the request of Page and Brin. [tweet]
6. Presently, Dennis Hwang’s job is also that of a Google webmaster. Designing doodles takes his 20% time. [tweet]
7. On May 21, 2010, Google honored Pacman game with a doodle. You can still type Pacman in Google search to play the game. [tweet]
8. Google also holds Doodle4Google competitions for students in grades K–12 to create their own Google doodle. [tweet]
9. On May 19, 2014, Google’s logo was replaced with an interactive Rubik’s cube. [tweet]

Googleplex is the company headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California, U.S.

1. Google is the only company that keeps on changing its logo so frequently. [tweet]
2. Google provides free food to employees 24/7. [tweet]
3. Google employed Charlie Ayers as an exclusive chef for its 40 people team in 1999. [tweet]
4. Charlie Ayers is now company’s executive chef and managing 150 workers across 10 restaurants at Googleplex. [tweet]
5. At the end of 2013, Google had 47,756 employees. Of these about 10,000 are software developers. [tweet]
6. Google’s IPO came in 2004. [tweet]
7. Before IPO, the annual salary of Eric Schmidt was $250,000. Page and Brin each earned $150,000 as salary. [tweet]
8. After IPO, Schmidt, Page and Brin began to take $1 as token salary because their main income came from stocks. [tweet]
9. Most (In 2011, 95%) of the Google’s revenue comes from online advertising. [tweet]
10. Google is massive, but in revenue it is still way behind Samsung, Apple, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony etc. [tweet]
11. Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is called “the Googleplex”. [tweet]
12. Google has a separate lab for secret projects. This lab is called Google X. [tweet]
13. But Google’s temporary employees, like those who scan books, can not access amenities like shuttle, cafes etc. [tweet]
14. Google owns a lot of domain names that are common misspellings of Google, like Gooogle.com, Gogle.com, Googlr.com etc. [tweet]
15. Google even owns domains 466453.com to protect its identity! [tweet]
16. Google’s aim is to make people spend LESS time on its website! Probably it’s the only company with such an aim! [tweet]
17. At present, Google has 12 data centers. Six are in the USA, three in Europe, two in Asia and one in South America. [tweet]
18. Each of Google data centers costs about $600 million. [tweet]
19. One such data center uses from 50 to 103 megawatts of electricity. [tweet]
20. So far, Google has acquired over 160 companies. [tweet]
21. Largest company acquired by Google is Motorola Mobility. It was purchased for $12.5 billion in 2011. [tweet]
22. First acquisition by Google was a Usenet company called Deja. It was acquired on 21 February 2001. [tweet]
23. Google founders bought a real and complete T-rex fossil, named Stan, and installed it in Google headquarters. This is to remind the employees to not let Google go extinct.
24. If a US employee pass away during employment at Google, their family receives 50% of salary, once a year, for ten years.
25. Mentalplex was the first April Fool joke that Google cracked (year 2000).

1. To see how Google search looked way back in 1998, just type Google in 1998 in the search. The results will be shown in the old design.
2. Secret of Google’s success lies in a search algorithm called PageRank. [tweet]
3. Google’s search algorithm takes into account over 200 factors before delivering the best results in a fraction of a second. [tweet]
4. Google search tracks 30 trillion “unique addresses” (URLs) on the Web. [tweet]
5. Every day, Google crawls over 20 billion websites. [tweet]
6. Google processes 100 billion searches each month, which means 3.3 billion per day and 12,000 per second. [tweet]
7. “I am Feeling Lucky” button automatically takes you to the first search result based on your query. [tweet]
8. If you type any number in Google search, it can convert the number in English. For example, to get 79032932 in English, type “79032932=english” in search.
9. You can play Atari game in Google. Just go to Google Images and search for “atari breakout“, you will get the option of playing the game.

1. Google takes care of smaller things also. It introduced Gmail in Cherokee language (which has less than 20,000 speakers!) [tweet]
2. 5 million miles of road has been photographed by Google for its Street View maps. [tweet]
3. Google bought YouTube from Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim for $1.65 billion in 2006. [tweet]
4. Over 4 billion videos are watched everyday on YouTube. [tweet]
5. 3 billion hours of video is watched on YouTube every month. [tweet]
6. The very first video on YouTube was uploaded by Jawed Karim. This video is still available and is titled “Me at the Zoo” [tweet]
7. Tens of thousand full length movies are available on YouTube! Go watch them for free! [tweet]
8. YouTube founders were earlier employees of PayPal.
9. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim got bonuses when eBay bought PayPal. They started YouTube with this money.
10. YouTube.com domain was registered on Valentine’s Day (14 February) in 2005.
11. Initially, YouTube was planned as a video dating site.
12. Jawed Karim wanted to see the video of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. He could not find it online, so he thought of starting a similar website which we now know as YouTube.
13. Steve Chen and Chad Hurley wanted to share a dinner’s video with friends. When they could not find a suitable options, they thought of a video sharing website which later on become YouTube.
14. Domain name UTube.com was registered before YouTube.com domain. When YouTube became popular, utube.com witnessed massive traffic.
15. UTube.com was owned by Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. They filed a lawsuit against YouTube for causing heavy traffic on their servers.
16. Later Universal Tube changed their website’s domain to utubeonline.com to avoid clash with YouTube.
17. YouTube hosts some very big videos. Longest video on YouTube is 571 hours and a minute and 41 seconds long.
18. Shortest video on YouTube is .01 seconds long!
19. Most popular non-music video on YouTube is “Charlie bit my finger”.
20. In the past, Google has failed in some projects. These include, Orkut, Buzz, Wave, Knol, Lively etc. [tweet]
21. As part of Google X, Google has been trying to develop cars that will drive themselves. [tweet]
22. Google Patents is a searchable database of all 8 million patents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. [tweet]

I will keep on updating this list of Google Facts. I would suggest that you bookmark this page so that you can come back and see what new facts have been added. Also, I request you to comment and let me know if any important trivia information is missing from this list. Thank you for using TechWelkin!