Google wasn’t always the world’s second most precious brand. Long before it had been a go-to verb, it had been an obedient digital dog, merely finding and retrieving stuff, playing fetch for internet users over and once again .
Eventually the small G — which started in 1995 as a Stanford University Ph.D. scientific research — grew into the large , $367 billion-dollar G we all know and love-hate today. not satisfied to fetch links alone, the worldwide tech colossus now chases meatier, more meaningful bones, like nailing the fastest internet speeds on the earth , rendering human drivers obsolete and, NBD, ending death.
Google was originally named BackRub.
In 1996, Page and Brin collaborated on a pioneering “web crawler” concept curiously called BackRub. Some speculate that the first search engine’s nomenclature was a nod to retrieving backlinks. BackRub, which linked to Brin’s and Page’s ’90s-tastic original homepages, lived on Stanford’s servers for quite a year, but eventually chewed up an excessive amount of bandwidth.
Google may be a play on the word “googol.”
On Sept. 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, Page and Brin registered the name of their mushrooming project as Google, a twist on “googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros. The name hinted at the seemingly infinite amount of knowledge the brainy pair code their fledgling program to mine, add up of and deliver. Many wondered if Google may be a misspelling of Googol.
Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man drawing .
The inaugural doodle was an out-of-the-office message that Page and Brin created in August of 1998 to let people know they’d shipped off to the Burning Man festival. the longer term billionaires positioned the long-lasting Man behind the second “o” in Google’s logo. Dude
Google’s first office was a rented garage.
So stereotypical Silicon Valley startup, right? Starting in September 1998, the company’s first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, Calif. Wojcicki, sister of 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, is Google employee number 16. She was Google’s first marketing manager and is now the CEO of YouTube. As for the house that built Google, the tech titan bought it, due to course it did. Then it filled the suburban ranch-style dwelling with candy, snacks and lava lamps.
A former caterer for The Grateful Dead was Google’s first chef.
In 1999, chef Charlie Ayers won a cook-off judged by Google’s employees, then only 40 altogether , to clinch the position, which he held for seven years. Ayers initially cooked for the Grateful Dead in exchange for free of charge admission to their legendary shows, but later took over catering for the jam band. At Google, he eventually served 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafés throughout its Mountain View, Calif., global headquarters.
Google New York began at a Starbucks on 86th Street.
In 2000, Google unofficially began its ny arm at a Starbucks in ny City. it had been helmed by a one-person sales “team.” Now, thousands of “NYooglers” clock-in at its swanky, 2.9 million-square-foot ny office, a former Port Authority building on 111 8th Ave.
Swedish Chef may be a language preference in Google search.
Gurndy morn-dee burn-dee, who knew? Yes, it’s true. In 2001, Google came touch with its inner yodelling Muppet and opened the gates for search queries and leads to Swedish Chef lingo (called Bork Bork Bork, to be technical). Other “joke” languages you’ll tickle Google’s algorithm with include: Elmer Fudd, Pirate, Klingon, Pig Latin and, of course, Hacker (a.k.a. 1337sp34k).
Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day, no joke.
Toying with Silicon Valley’s longstanding tradition of pulling April Fool’s Day pranks, Google unveiled Gmail on April 1, 2004, during a wackily-worded announcement that was widely misconstrued as a hoax. It wasn’t Google Gulp. it had been an excellent double fake and therefore the precursor to a Google staple that now serves many users across the planet a day .
Googlers ride colorful “gBikes” round the Googleplex.
Launched in 2007, Google’s Googleplex campus commuter bike program began as a modest fleet of azure Huffys. Then came the goofy “clown bikes.” Now Googlers ride quite 1,000 primary-colored, basket-equipped beach cruisers, dubbed “gBikes,” round the two-mile expanse that’s Google Mountain View. Interestingly, none of the bikes have locks. Employees simply “borrow” the closest set of wheels. When they’re done, they drop them off conveniently on the brink of office entryways for other Googlers to use.
Google negotiated its acquisition of YouTube’s at Denny’s over mozzarella sticks.
“We didn’t want to satisfy at offices,” YouTube co-founder Steven Chen said, “so we were like, ‘Where’s an area that none folks would go?’” That place clothed to be a Denny’s in Palo Alto , Calif. Mozzarella sticks were nibbled, hands were shaken. The 2006 landmark acquisition was a slam for Chen and co-founders Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. great for the time. Google apportioned $1.65 billion for what would explode into the Internet’s most-watched — and most uploaded-to — video platform.
Its leaders are in it for the end of the day .
In 2008, Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google and currently the chief chairman of Alphabet, told Fortune before the corporate went public in 2004, that the trio of Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin agreed to figure together for 20 years.
The early days of Google weren’t super glamorous.
Schmidt told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman during an interview for Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast that the previous CEO’s first office at the corporate was an 8-by-12-foot space that he shared with the company’s then VP of engineering, Amit Singhal.
The company helped fight fictional vampires.
The first instance of Google getting used as a verb — “to Google” something — on television occurred during an Oct. 15, 2002, episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Google has had a pet-friendly office since the start .
One of the company’s earliest employees was a friendly Leonberger named Yoshka, who came to figure together with his owner, Google’s senior vice chairman of operations Urs Hoelzle.
It speaks many languages.
In 2000, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish were the primary 10 language versions of the location to be available to the general public .
Google image search launched during a big way.
The company unrolled Google Image search in 2001 with a whopping 250 million images for users to peruse. great for day one.
When it went public, Google was valued the maximum amount as General Motors.
The company sold 19,605,052 shares of stock for $85 per share. it had been valued at $27 billion.
Google gave Mountain View the gift of free Wi-Fi.
In 2006, the corporate decided to supply Mountain View, the California town where its main headquarters is found , with free city-wide Wi-Fi. While certainly generous, it likely just meant that even more people were liberal to hop on the online and use the program .