1. Since Google’s centerpiece in search technology was patented by Stanford University (on behalf of the founders Larry Page & Sergey Brin), Google gave Stanford 1.8 million shares for exclusive right to the patent that the university later sold for a staggering $336 million.
2. Google earns 97 percent of its revenues from advertising alone. This amounts to $20 billion.
3. Did you know that Google logs each search queries into its systems to enhance future searches?
4. They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitor how people use a page of results.
5. Google has the largest network of translators in the world; this is needed for continuously integrating searches and indexing web pages into their engine.
6. The reason Orkut doesn’t look or feel like a Google application was that the designer in-charge was given free reign to do things his way without the usual company procedures. Google is looking to improve Orkut’s resource utilization however.
7. Google makes small changes on their products very often. They sometimes try a particular feature with a set of users from a given network or region; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
8. The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in traits it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it to be kept. It was like a comfort button.
9. When Google was founded, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders tossed a coin to decide what position they would take.
10. Notice the logos appearing on your Google homepage around major events or holidays? This is known as the Google Doodle. The first one was dedicated to the Burning Man festival in 1998. You can check out past Google doodles at google.com/logos.
11. By July 2008, Google had indexed an astounding 1 trillion (1000000000000) pages on the Internet.
12. Heard of Mentaplex? It was an April fool’s joke that Google could read peoples minds and search the Internet for what they were thinking of. The joke also included broadband access wires coming out from people’s toilet bowls! Try it out at http://www.google.com/mentalplex
13. Larry Page, the co founder of Google once made an inkjet printer out of Lego blocks when he was in college.
14. There are more then 600 million phones. Even then, more than half the population of the entire world hasn’t yet made a phone call.
15. All three founders of YouTube, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim were working for PayPal when they started YouTube.
16. Did you know that the domain YouTube.com was registered on Valentine's Day (February 14, 2005)
17. YouTube loves young Americans? Here’s proof: 70 percent of the YouTube’s registered users are from USA and half of YouTube users are under 20 years old.
18. If YouTube was Hollywood, they have enough material to release 60,000 new films every week.
19. One of the biggest leaps in Google’s search engine usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” This instantly doubled their traffic.
20. The total amount of bandwidth used by YouTube is about the same as used by entire Internet in 2000.
21. One needs over 1000 years of time to watch all videos on YouTube (but there will be billion of more videos uploaded on YouTube by then.)
22. Most popular category for uploder videos is ‘Music’ having around 20 percent YouTube videos.
23. Gmail was internally used for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there were approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate all of these.
24. United States uses upload most of YouTube videos followed by UK. Americans are also the number-one watchers of YouTube videos followed by Japan.
25. The first ever video that was uploaded on YouTube is by Jawed Karim (one of YouTube founders) titled “Me at zoo” on April 23rd, 2005. This video is all of 18 seconds long.
26. There isn’t any restriction for proper dress code in the Google offices. This is to ensure comfort and a productive working environment. So one may dress up in pajamas or even as a superhero.
27. Tom Vendetta is the youngest Google employee ever hired. He was hired by Google when he was just 15 years old. Vendetta used to fool his friends by sending fake press releases and news. Vendetta was employed because he was young and would know young hackers thought. His job was to help address security flaws in Gmail.
28. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.
29. The first ever search engine was called “Archie” and was created way back in 1990 by a Canadian student Alan Emtage.
30. In 2007, Google became the most visited website with 700 million users. It beat the next popular website, Microsoft.com by over 200 million hits. In March 2010, Facebook overtook Google!
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