Facts about Google | Google
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, andfor most of that time Google.com has been the most trafficked website in the world.Although it has faced stiff competition from Facebook in recent years, it still remainsthe #1 most visited website.
The amount of searches Google processes everyday is mind boggling. In 2012 people made a total of 1,873,910,000,000 google searches.That's an average of 5,134,000,000 searches per day or 59,421 searches per second.
Yet Google manages to return every single one of these search results in about 300 milli seconds. But the infrastructure required to supportall this is enormous, and unfathomably expensive. Google are highly secretive about the numberand locations of their data centres. But it is estimated they have over 2 million serversworldwide. And Google spends over $4 billion on new datacentres and servers every year.
It's easy to think that not much happens when you typesomething into Google, but just two google searches produce the same amount of carbondioxide as boiling a kettle. But Google isn't just a search engine. Googleprovides over 100 products and services including Google Mail, Drive, Plus, Translate, Maps,Play, Analytics, Blogger and many, many more. Oh and don't forget YouTube, which Googlebought for a measly $1.65 billion in 2006. Commonly searched terms are cached.
This meansGoogle doesn't have to recalculate the results every time it is searched and the cached searchresults can be served up almost instantaneously to the user. However, every day 15% of searches made havenever before been typed into the search engine. That's 500 million searches every day thatGoogle has never seen before, and it has always been that way for the 15 years the companyhas existed. Surprisingly the percentage of brand new searches made on Google has neverreally dropped.
Brand new searches like this take up a lotmore processing power and take considerably longer to render the results, because everythinghas to be calculated from scratch. So to combat this, Google recently added a new productto its search, called Knowledge Graph. Knowledge Graph is a vast database which hold scopious amounts of data on a wide range of entities, such as topics, people and events,the system also observes the connections between them, similar to the human brain.
This allows Google to present you with answers instead of just a list of links. You can see thisin action, by asking Google questions such as "What is the speed of light?". But if Google is so advanced, why is the homepageso basic? The main reason it's so bare is because the Google founders, Larry Page andSergey Brin, didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact for a long timethere was no submit button and the only way to kick start your google search was by pressingthe return key. Due to the sparseness of the homepage in earlyuser tests they noticed people were just sitting around looking at the screen.
After minutesof nothingness, the tester asked "What's up?". To which they replied "We are waiting forthe rest of it". To solve this problem, the Google Copyright message was added to actas a crude end of page marker. But how did the name Google come about? Wellthe name was actually an accident. The founders were going for the name Googol, which is aone followed by one hundred zeros. However they misspelt it as Google.
The I'm feeling lucky button, which takesusers straight to the first search result is nearly never used. However in trials, theyfound removing it somehow reduces the Google experience. It is estimated to cost Googlearound $100 million in lost advertising revenue every year. One of Google's most successful features wasthe "Did you mean..." spelling corrector. When implemented this instantly doubled theirtraffic. Google has the largest network or translatorsin the world.
Google is constantly developing new features,but before they can be released to the entire Google user base, Google tests them on a smallpercentage and closely monitors the results. At least 20% of people have to use a featureor it will be scrapped. Unlike many large corporations, emailing Googleisn't fruitless. Google actively listens to feedback. Speaking of email, Gmail was used internallyfor 2 years before it's launch to the public.
Until recently all Google employees were encouragedto spend 20% of their time at work, working on their own projects. This innovative managementtechnique gave rise to some of Google's biggest projects, including AdSense, Gmail, GoogleTransit, Google News and Google Talk. Some core Google services recently went downfor 5 minutes causing worldwide internet traffic to drop off by an enormous 40 per cent. New Google employees are called "Noogles",they are initiated by having to wear a propeller beanie cap on their first Friday.
Google loves food, the first chef that Google employed earned $26 million from his stock options. Google's headquarters, aptly namedThe Googleplex has 18 cafeterias on campus, with diverse menus. What's more, all Googleemployees are provided with free, restaurant quality breakfast, lunch and dinner, includingdrinks. But working at Google comes with an arrayof free benefits, including on-site gyms and daycare as well as a complementary conciergeservice to assist with everyday tasks. The Googleplex is also fitted out with laundryrooms, two swimming pools and multiple sand volleyball courts.
As well as some bizarre installations likea gigantic T-Rex skeleton, a scale replica of SpaceShipOne, enormous Android-themed models,pink flamingos, a large LEGO man, Google-coloured phone boxes and adult sized ball pits. Google employees can give their co-workersmassage credits for a job well done on a project. These credits can be redeemed for a free one hour massage on campus. Every friday employees can unwind and socialisewith free beer and wine. Google employees receive incredible death benefits.
If a Googler passes away, their surviving spouse continues to get half oftheir salary for the next 10 years as well as $1,000 a month for each of the Googler's children. And finally, Google's first ever Tweet in February 2009 looked like this: "I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 0110100101101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010." Which, when translated from binary code reads"I'm feeling lucky".
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