What you know about Google

Did you know that Google accidentally caused an invasion or that they're developing a computer so powerful it can program itself well it's true and that is just the tip of the iceberg so welcome to my top 50 things to know about them.

50 facts about Google

Google has its main headquarters in California spread across the massive campus it calls the Googleplex but what happens there might surprise you for starters Google makes it a mission to keep stress as low as possible they've installed high-tech energy pods which use NASA science to help people achieve brief but effective naps during the day and probably my favorite thing slides right out of a playground to get from upper floors to lower floors is a weird touch for sure but I could see how it gives people little moments of stress relief and it's not just about stress, Google's campus is partly built like a playground to stimulate creativity one example of this in action is you know that Dino run game that pops up on Google when you have no internet well that was in part inspired by the massive t-rex dinosaur statue they have their funny story as well as the whole creativity element

that statue is bought to remind the workers at Google to make sure that Google doesn't go extinct like the dinosaurs did they even refute convention when it comes to naming their employees if you're a mature Google worker you're a Googler if you're new in taking your Noogler if you've left the company you're like an X there for a zoo glow and if you've got a pet it's a doodler but I gotta say the perks are definitely worth the eccentricity Googlers get gourmet dishes from around the world cooked for them they don't pay for it and the founders made it clear that no employee should be more than 200 feet from a cafeteria if this wasn't enough of a perk when a Google employee dies their partner gets half of their wage for the next 10 years so this outbox thinking is definitely one of the factors I think is contributed to Google becoming a success story they're incredibly young Google is actually less old than even Netflix and yet they've got one of the highest revenues of all time they make around two hundred thousand dollars of revenue per minute not quite as much as Apple's 300,000 but not a figure to be looked down on by any stretch it's crazy to think that with everything they've built that Google only exists because of an incredibly lucky encounter the two founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin they only met because Larry was considering applying to a grad school and Sergey just so happened to be at that grad school and was assigned to show him around on the day in the early days Google was actually called backrub there was a reason back then when people would search your the website was ranked just based on how many backlinks he had or in other words how many other sites had links that came back to your site if there were lots of other sites linking to your site, Google considered it an important site and therefore ranked it higher they spent a year with this name before seeing the the bigger picture they could create with this technology after which backrub became Google named after the very real word Google a Google is a name given to a massive number one followed by a hundred zeros, it just signifies the idea that Google intended to become this almost limitless bank of information but it wasn't always high tech offices and gourmet foods the entirety of Google was first stored on 10 4 gigabyte hard drives arranged in wait for it a Lego casing the Lego actually made it easy for them to attach more storage later compare that then to the 20 petabytes of information that Google processes per day now it's a world apart even though it's only been 20 years to try and conceptualize just how much information one petabyte carries imagine a Ford drawer filing the cabinet you know the big ones the ones that are kind of just as tall as a person pack that full of paper full to the brim with each page packed with the information then combine a thousand of these filing cabinets together to create one super filing cabinet and then get twenty thousand of those that's just one petabyte okay what about Google's smartphone operating system Android why is a mobile phone OS named after a robot well Andy Rubin who is one of the founders was given the nickname Android

At his previous job just because of how much he loved robotics also interesting is the logo the person who designed it she Ashley got her inspiration from a bathroom sign the word Android usually refers to a male robot so she took the men's bathroom image adjusted it to fit the brief and used a green color to signify growth because I guess plants are green and plants grow this one's unexpected you might know that Microsoft's Windows Mobile software kind of failed to gain traction but that doesn't mean they've completely failed in the smartphone space they actually make a ton of money from Android in between five and fifteen dollars per smartphone sold they own patents that Android supposedly infringes on butter's that are just taking him to court, both parties are better off if Microsoft just tells Android to pay them royalties for it and speaking of patents Google lost them and I've got a few favorites google has patented an electronic tattoo but with a tiny working printed circuit board made to power an internal microphone that can be placed inside your body to make communication with your smart devices clearer they've also patented a smart walking stick with embedded cameras and a GPS system it created to capture Google Maps Street View in remote locations the idea was to hand these out to employees to go walking with and when they do that every time their stick would touch the ground the camera on top would take a photo and the GPS module will associate that with specific coordinates they have even tried to patent the hand heart gesture and it has got nothing to do with showing someone your feelings about them when they were investing heavily in their Google glass project glasses that could see the world with augmented reality they wanted a hand gesture that people could make in front of their glasses to tell the glasses to take a photo of whatever you were seeing also related to this you probably know Google makes a lot of their money from advertising and the best way to maximize this revenue is to make sure that the ads you're sending are well matched to the consumers seeing those ads if you as a viewer like an ad you see it's a win-win situation you're discovering a new product you'll find it useful and the company selling it potentially gets a new sale so in order to best match these ads with the customer's Google wants to know as much information about you as possible and they've made it clear that they've wanted to go further they actually applied for a patent to equip smartphones with sensors that could detect environmental conditions like light and temperature to further personalized ads based on this so for example they could know if you're sitting in the baking hot Sun and then they could send you a personalized advert for a local ice-cream van they also patented a gaze tracking system where while showing adverts Google can see if people are actually looking at them they can see where your pupils are facing and even the dilation of them which would signal how much of emotional response the advert give vote and this leads me onto the slightly creepy side of Google starting with our reliance on it on the 16th of August 2013 Google went down for five minutes and in that time global Internet traffic went down by 40 percent that is crazy or another example the American country of Nicaragua accident error map said that Nicaragua owned a piece of land that was actually part of Costa Rica so without realizing it was just a mistake on Google's end the Nicaraguans actually went to Costa Rica and started planting their flags down a few years ago Google acquired a company called deep mind who is working on something they called the neural Turing machine a computer built in a similar way to the human brain combining human pattern recognition with the sheer ability of a computer to just crunch numbers it can program itself it's not all creepy though Google is a company that likes to have a lot of fun and one of the ways they do this is through Easter eggs, their products and services are littered with them if you Search Google in 1998 it'll show you how the site looked back in the day it makes you very glad we've moved on since then if you search for vanoss and click the Infinity Gauntlet on the right-hand side you'll notice your search results fading away one by one until only 50% of them remain clicking again restores them this will make a lot more sense if you've seen the Marvel films or alternatively in Google Images if you search for Atari breakout it'll actually, allow you to play the game in your browser this one's really unusual but Google owns the domain name Google sucks calm and not exactly an Easter Egg but you also might not have known that Google ignores the dots in Gmail addresses if I sent an email to either of these two addresses it arrived at the same place directions in certain parts of Scotland they used to list the Loch Ness monster as a travel option now I've talked a lot about Google's quirky jerky approach to a lot of things this sometimes works really well for them but it also sometimes backfires on April 1st, 2004 Google announced Gmail which was kind of crazy it offered people a free gigabyte of online storage compared to the two megabytes that Hotmail did at the time but the problem was because they've been running April Fools pranks on this exact day every year people thought Gmail was a joke another example probably worse was on April 1st, 2007 Google sent an email out to employees that a Python had escaped and was loose in the facility, they were not joking and they have been other fails you might remember something called project tango around 2014 Google sensed the dawn of augmented reality and they tried to build a system for phones to use it the problem was that it was almost too ahead of its time it required manufacturers to equip their phones with way too many sensors for a benefit that at the time barely extended beyond a novelty the project was canned and later converted to what a lot of Android phones use now something called AR core and there was also Google help out which I honestly think had potential it was a little bit like Fiverr if you've ever heard about people who need help with something they'd log on and they could talk to an expert to try and solve their problem and pay them for their time so if I fancied myself as a bit of a Wi-Fi expert I could sign up as an expert and people could pay me to fix their Wi-Fi problems one thing that Google does do really well though is they're consistently trying to minimize their environmental impact as of now Google runs on a hundred percent renewable energy every bit of energy that's used in their offices and their data centers that come from renewable sources they also instead of using traditional machinery rent two hundred goats to mow the lawns of their Googleplex headquarters encourage workers to ride bikes around the campus and it's one of the few places in the world where none of these bikes are actually locked to anything you just pick up the nearest one you find to write it to the building you want to go to and leave it there for the next person I'm not completely sure it's paid off they apparently lose up to 250 bikes per week because of their liberal approach now just before my favorite Google nuggets what about their logo well it's changed a fair bit since launching their first iteration in my honest opinion is pretty highness looking

but they quickly swapped it out for a more modern approach I do like the concept of having mostly primary colors red green and blue with the addition of yellow to show that Google doesn't just follow the rules it changes them you also might not have realized that for some time now on the E in the Google logo has been slightly rotated again just show that they like to be unconventional oh yeah and the company's motto literally until a few years ago was just don't be evil which they then swapped out to probably a safer move do the right thing and finally, my top five miscellaneous Google facts when they were just starting the two of her founders rented a garage from a woman to work in pretty standard beginning for a big tech firm we've heard all before but as it turned out this the woman was Susan Wojcicki who would actually end up becoming the CEO of YouTube Google helps to fund calico a biotech company built to try and fight death itself you might already know that Google is owned by a company called alphabet the funny thing about them though is that when they found out that alphabet com was already taken they decided to go for a URL of a B C dot X Y Z that's awesome one of the company's lifelong missions from very early on was to scan every book in existence interning fading paper into an everlasting online record of everything ever written it's quite a nice idea but they run into a bit of a problem trying to do it to stall wave it was running well literally truck after truck of books would arrive at Google's head offices they would scan them and then return them to libraries but about 25 million books in authors and publishers started turning around and being like what are you doing whilst Google thought their scanning was harmless and considered fair use for the purposes of Education the writers thought otherwise Google's records they were never destroyed just banned so some way in the vaults of Google is 25 million books that no one is allowed to read and finally I find this one pretty funny there was a point when Google offered to sell their company to Yahoo for just 1 million dollars Yahoo said no and now Google is worth about 300 thousand times.