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20 Things About Stuff - you and your kids might  not know

20 things about Google you may not know

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  1. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin together, own about 14 percent of Google shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock.

  2. Alexa, a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the world.

  3. Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

  4. Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

  5. Google’s unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil".

  6. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.

  7. Google was first based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park, California.

  8. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford was the first employee.

  9. Google was initially funded by an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

  10. Early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer.

  11. Google’s market value was $527 Billion at end of 2015.

  12. Google, along with Amazon and Apple in a race to be the first $1 Trillion Dollar company.

  13. According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the second most valuable brand in the world.

  14. As of October 2016, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries.

  15. Google's most efficient data center runs at 95 °F (35 °C) using only fresh air cooling, requiring no electrically powered air conditioning.

  16. Google servers run so hot that humans cannot go near them for extended periods.

  17. In September 2016, Google began its Google Station initiative, a project for public Wi-Fi at railway stations in India.

  18. On Fortune magazine's list of the best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012.

  19. As of the second quarter in 2015, Google has 57,100 employees.

  20. The Google headquarters lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles.

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