Tech giant Google celebrates its 25th birthday today.
The search giant began as a Stanford University research project before being founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Google was created to manage the vast amount of information on the Internet. Later, its ad-based revenue strategy went public in 2004 as it quickly gained prominence. It developed services outside of search over time, including Gmail, Android, and Chrome. Alphabet Inc. became the parent company of Google after a corporate restructuring in 2015. Today, Google is a major player in the global digital industry with a focus on hardware, search, advertising and advanced technologies such as AI and self-driving cars.
According to the official website, “Much has changed since 1998 – including our logo as seen in today’s Doodle – but the mission has remained the same: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful .Billions of people from around the globe use Google to search, connect, work, play and more!”
11 interesting facts about Google
Google was formerly known as Backrub. Later, the business changed its name to Google, a typo of the word googol. The term refers to the mathematical concept ‘one to one hundred zero’ which symbolizes the company’s aim to ensure that all information is available to all.
About 8.5 billion searches are done on Google every day. The world experienced a search frenzy in 2022 with 99,000 searches per second, which is astounding. Also, of all 15% of all Google searches are always unique.
The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary recognized “Google” as a verb in 2006. The fact that “Googling” has become the default term for conducting an Internet search shows how ingrained Google has become in our lives. daily.
Google’s first office was located in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who founded YouTube. A specially designed Lego cabinet was used to store Google’s first server.
To achieve its 2030 goal of having net zero emissions across all operations and value chains, Google has invested in “adaptive reuse projects,” in which new offices are built into existing structures rather than new construction .
Google launched its first overseas office in Tokyo, Japan in 2001, and in 2002, opened a second one in Hamburg, Germany. They now have office and data center locations in more than 200 cities worldwide and on six continents.
In Belo Horizonte, the first urban farm in Latin America is located in the same building as the Google Brazil office. So all the food served here is fresh from the farm.
GBikes were introduced in 2007 to help Google employees. And around 1.9 million rides were successfully completed in 2019 across the GBike fleet, totaling 765,000 miles – or over 31 rotations of the Earth!
