- Google was incorporated on Sept 4, 1998, in a friend’s garage in California
- The search engine has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest companies
- It is valued at around $800 billion and owns the $75 billion giant YouTube
Twenty years ago, two Stanford students, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin filed Google, Inc. for incorporation in the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki, who would go on to become Google’s employee No.16 and later YouTube CEO.
Over the subsequent two decades, the search engine became the cornerstone of a digital empire that covers everything from images, maps, translation, video-streaming, tech accessories, smartphones, internet browser, and driverless cars.
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Its parent company, Alphabet, is valued at over $800 billion and Google is the most popular search engine in most countries including India, Brazil, the US, the UK, and western European countries such as France, Spain, and Italy.
Since incorporating in 1998, Google has become one of the world’s biggest companies.
To celebrate Google’s 20th anniversary, here are ten things you didn’t know about the search engine giant.
Google was meant to be Googol
Google was originally going to be called Googol, a mathematical term to describe a number that starts with 1 and is followed by 100 zeroes.
The rationale behind this was that Page and Brin wanted to create something that could organize vast amounts of data. However, after a misspelling resulted in Google, the new name stuck.
It could have been Yahoo’s for $1m
Google was by no means the first internet search engine, with the likes of AskJeeves and Yahoo predating it.
In fact, Page and Brin tried to sell the company to Yahoo for $1 million in 1998. Yahoo turned them down. Yahoo turned them down again in 2002 when the asking price was $5 billion.
The Google Doodle
The Google Doodle is the company’s way of celebrating culturally significant events and people.
A relevant image is incorporated into the Google logo on the homepage. Recent doodles include a tribute to the 20th-century German artist, Oskar Schlemmer. The very first Google Doodle was of a stick man in 1998 to mark Page and Brin’s trip to that year’s Burning Man Festival.
Klingon Google
Klingon, the language featured in the Star Trek series, is one of the many Google language interfaces available.
Other interesting options include Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny’s nemesis who can’t pronounce his Rs- this option turns phrases like Google Search into Google Seawch.
Google’s IPO
Google went public in 2004, with shares selling at $85 apiece. The company ended up selling 22.5 million shares, raising over $1.9 billion.
Google owns YouTube
The search engine bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006.
In 2018, the video-streaming platform is valued at $75 billion, while Morgan Stanley worked out that the company would be worth $160 billion if it were a separate entity.
You can play a game on Google Images
Google Images was launched in July 2001 and as well as doing for images what it did for text search queries, Google Images also acts as a surprising gaming platform. Simply type Atari Breakout into Google Images and watch the screen turn the image tiles into the iconic retro computer game.
Ahhh, the great outdoors. 🐜 Walk on the wild side of #GoogleImages trends to find out what animals to see (…and some to maybe avoid) on your end-of-summer adventures → https://t.co/Z65DaBeWQb pic.twitter.com/8Aw5OeCAem
— Google (@Google) 30 August 2018
Gooogle.com
To anticipate common typos when typing Google, the search engine owns the domain names like gooogle.com, gogle.com, and googlr.com.
Employee benefits
If a Google employee in America dies while working for the company, their surviving partner is paid 50 percent of the employee’s salary for the next ten years.
NASA
In 2014, Google leased NASA’s Moffett Airfield for the next 60 years, at a cost of around $1.6 billion. Back in 2007, the search engine giant used the airfield in exchange for NASA using Google’s private planes.
