Google is not the brand of today. Earlier, it was just used for finding and retrieving stuff and playing fetch by internet users. But the two founders of Google made it a global tech search engine that is now regarded as the World’s second most valuable brand.
So let’s check out some crazy facts behind Google that you don’t know yet –
1. Two founders of Google met by chance:
When Page just earned a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan and was trying for taking admission to Stanford University for Ph.D., Brin was already a Ph.D. candidate. And Brin was assigned to show Page the campus of that University. Thus the two minds met and the result is now a great thing.
2. Google was first named as BackRub:
Brin and Page in 1996 worked together on a pioneering “web crawler” concept curiously called BackRub. Then they thought to name it BackRub.
3. A rented office was Google’s first office:
Sister of 23&Me founder Anne, Wojcicki, Calif Wojcicki who is Google’s first marketing manager and the current CEO of YouTube, was the 16th employee in Google. In 1998, when Google was just started, this company had its first workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave.
4. Gmail was first launched on April Fool’s Day:
Google revealed Gmail on 1st April 2004 toying with Silicon Valley’s longstanding tradition of pulling April Fool’s Day pranks. That announcement was widely misconstrued as a hoax. It was actually the precursor to a Google staple and double fake that is serving millions of users now across the world every day.
5. Google could be accessed in 10 languages after it was first launched:
When Google was just launched, initially 10 language versions of the site to be available to the public, such as Italian, French, German, Finnish, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. And all these languages got available by the year 2000.
6. Google gifted free city-wide WI-FI to Mountain View:
Google decided in 2006 to provide free city-wide WI-FI to Mountain View, the California town where its main headquarters are located. It might sound generous, but it was their plan to bring more people in the web so that the usage of Google can increase.
7. Google’s first chef was the former caterer of The Grateful Dead:
Charlie Ayers in 1999, won a cook-off that was judged by Google’s employees. That former chef of The Grateful Dead, who worked in exchange for free admission to their legendary shows, won that contest. He also catered for the jam brand. After winning the contest, he started to serve 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafes throughout the global headquarters of Mountain View.
8. Yahoo once rejected to buy Google:
Once the founders of Google tried to sell their search engine to Yahoo, but Yahoo rejected that. Then in 2002, they wanted to buy Google for $3 billion when Google’s value became around $400 billion. Then usually Google said no to Yahoo.
9. Earlier, the homepage of Google was not charming enough:
The founders of Google did not know HTML when they first launched it. That’s why it was impossible for them to create a fancy homepage. They had no idea how they could design a submit button on Google.
10. Google decreased the global internet usage by 40% in 2013:
You might have heard that on 16th August 2013, Google was not reachable for 5 minutes. And it effected a lot in the technological world. Global internet usage was decreased by 40%.