Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google fist began creating the program that would eventually become known to the world as Google in 1996. Since then, this one company has for many people almost become synonymous with the internet. In fact, the word “google” is one of the few names to be entered into a dictionary as a word in its own right. Here are a few fun facts about Google, that I found while googling other things.
1. Lego Server
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google built their first server for their new company, they built the housing out of Lego bricks. The server is now on display Stanford’s Computer Museum.
2. The first Google doodle
Every so often, the Google logo that appears on the Google homepage is replaced by a “Google doodle”, which is basically a picture with the word “Google” in it. These doodles are usually used to commemorate events such as holidays or anniversaries. The first doodle was of the Google logo with a picture of a burning man behind the second “o”. It was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and was supposed to be a message to customers that they would be out of the office and at the Burning Man festival held in the Nevada Desert.
3. Google languages
Currently, Google can be set to only show pages from the internet in one of almost 40 different languages. The Google homepage and information can also be set to different languages, 134 and counting. These languages include Afrikaans to Hebrew to Zulu, and even made up languages such as Pirate, Elmer Fudd and Klingon. (Pirate is currently my favourite, with an “I be feelin’ lucky” button instead of the usual “I’m feeling lucky”.)
4. Don’t be Evil
According to Wikipedia, the unofficial motto of Google is “Don’t be Evil”, and was first created by Paul Buchheit, one of the engineers working at Google.
5. Google hires Goats?
Google is trying to be eco-friendly. Instead of using normal lawnmowers, they have hired about 200 goats to take care of their grounds for them. The goats have been hired from a company called California Grazing, and the goats come in for about a week at a time to do double duty as lawn mowers and fertilizers.
6. Google/Backend
The company now known as Google didn’t start out life with it’s current name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin first named their company BackRub, as a play on the fact that it used the backlinks of websites in order to search the web.
7. Google/Googol
The name “Google” comes from a misspelling of the word Googol, a word used to refer to the mathematical number of 1 followed by 100 zeroes, or 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
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