Ten things you didn’t know about Google

Google has been simplifying the lives of people around the world since 1998; it has done this so effectively that it is easily one of the largest companies in the world. Google is a leader in innovation, and it is responsible for well over 100 products and services to date that people use and trust every day. Everyone is familiar with Google, but there are some exciting things behind the scenes that you might not know about. You can read ten of these things in the list below.

It acquires an average of one company per week

In 2011, Google's chairman spoke at the Le Web conference about everything going on within the company. During his talk, he made a joke about Google buying a company a day! While that was an exaggeration and all in good fun, Google has acquired roughly one company every week since 2010, according to some sources. Google owns Android, Youtube, Waze, Songza, ReCAPTCHA, parts of HTC and so much more.

It was originally called Backrub

This one has a lot of us shaking our heads for just the sound of it weird. All kidding aside, but it actually makes a lot of sense, especially given the residual importance of backlinks today. Google ranks pages based on a number of factors now, but the original algorithm focused solely on how many backlinks a page had and ranked it accordingly. It's a good thing they changed the name considering how the term Google is used today!

Google owns several misspelled variants

www.gooogle.com, www.gogle.com and www.googlr.com among many others belong to Google. It seems like it would be a more widespread tactic because of how genius it is. Many of the common typos that someone can make when typing the name of the site redirect to Google. This is good because it looks to the users; basically, this is the ultimate “did you mean…?” But it also drives more traffic to Google itself if someone deliberately tried to go to ggogle.com for some reason.

Something exciting almost happened

Maybe not. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google as graduate students at Stanford back in 1998 and tried to sell the company to Excite in 1999. Excite is an Internet portal that originated in 1995. It provides a variety of content similar to Yahoo, including news and weather, a meta search engine, a web-based e -mail, instant messages, stock quotes and so on. The price tag Google put on itself at the time was $1 million and the CEO rejected the offer. Google is now worth several hundred billion.

The opening doodle was…

A Google Doodle is a special addition or change to the logo on Google websites that celebrates holidays, events, achievements and notable people. Creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin used the first doodle, symbolizing Burning Man, to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed while they were gone. Doodles have come a long way from being static images with descriptive floating text. Now many of them are animated and hyperlinked to pages that describe the meaning of today's Doodle. They have also increased drastically in frequency.

The most private private jets

From 2007 to 2013, Nasa's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley leased space in one of its aircraft hangers to H211, a private company responsible for the plane owned and leased by Google executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. Not only did they have private jets, but also a runway that was completely inaccessible to anyone else. Due to several controversies, most notably one involving discounted jet fuel, Google built its own private corporate jet facility in late 2013. The company spent $82 million to create the facility.

The Google Goats

Google uses goats to mow its lawn at The Googleplex at Mountain View as part of its green initiative. A spokesperson says it costs about the same as investing in landscaping from a private company, and several employees find it reassuring to see the goats eating the grass. Works much better than listening to a lawnmower for a few hours! The goats, 200 in all, spend a week at Google munching on and fertilizing the grass. Of course, this is done with the help of a dedicated shepherd who is a border collie named Jen.

It has interesting employment tactics

Google Foobar is sort of a recruiting tool for Google, and it has to do with certain search terms that you might be looking at. To join Foobar, you need to be invited by a friend or have it show up when you search for certain coding terms on Google, like Python, for example. After you join, Foobar gives users a question and a time limit to solve it by fixing the code. The puzzles get progressively more difficult and once a user has reached level 3, they have the option to ask a Google recruiter to review their code and maybe get in touch.

What is a Google anyway?

Google sounds weird, really (maybe not as weird as Backrub). We are just so used to hearing, reading and using the term on a daily basis that it has become like second nature. It feels normal, but if you try to say it slowly, you might have to giggle. The term is an alternative spelling of a mathematical term, googol. A googol is a ridiculously large number, a one followed by 100 zeros. When deciding on a name, the creators decided that it was a perfect term to encompass the goal of the young search engine: to index an unfathomable number of web pages on the Internet.

It just might be the best place to work

Articles appear all the time about how cool it is to work at Google. The company has also been ranked as one of the best places to work by a variety of lists, including the Fortune list as well. The offices are beautiful, there is a happy hour, there are goats outside, everything is amazing. No one in the office is ever more than 150 feet from a snack (and that's a rule). Google's death benefit guarantees their spouse 50% of salary for a decade after their passing.