<Twenty Interesting facts about Google ⁄ >

1.Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.

2.The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

3.Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.

4.Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 ears prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

5. It consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

6.The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

7.Google's index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of eight billions(2005) of web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.

8.Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day was a joke.

9.Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.

10.Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.

11.Google has a world-class staff of 9,378 full-time employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex located at Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway.

12.Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

13."I feel lucky" is nearly never used. It was a comfort button which actually takes to the first web page returned by the search results.

14.Google use the unique 20%/5% rules. That is ,if at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.

15.Employees in Google are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. That's why we have GMail,Google News and Orkut now.



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