Google has become an integral part of our lives and the word has even become a verb as we are often heard to say let’s “Google” that.
Google was founded in 1997 by two Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin whose initial company mission statement was
Which they seem to have made a good dent in achieving since they started the company.“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
It’s been barely 13 years since conception but the search company whose slogan is “Don’t be evil”
(reputed to have been coined by the Google engineer Paul Buchheit in
2006 ) has now struck out into other technology areas beyond their core
search business such as
- The successful Android mobile operating system which is reporting 400,000 activations per day (April 2011)
- Picasa photo organisation
- Google ‘Earth’ the 3D view of the earth technology that was initially the start up Keyhole
- Google Energy that is developing and investing in renewable energy projects such as wind farms in North Dakota
- Google Driverless Car that uses Google Street View with artificial intelligence technology
50 Amazing Google Facts and Figures
- The original nickname was BackRub due to the backlink technology used to determine site importance but eventually changed the name to Google originating from the misspelling of the word “Googol (the mathematician’s term for the number one followed by one hundred zeros) to signify the large quantities of information for people that it would provide.
- Google began as a research project in 1996
- Google.com domain went online in 1997
- The first funding of $100,000 for Google was provided by Andy Bechtolsheim the co-founder of Sun Microsystems
- The CEO for ‘Excite’ George Bell rejected to buy Google when it was offered to him for $1 million when Brin and Page were finding the search engine taking up to much time from their research in 1999
- The first round of venture capital of $25 million was provided in 1999 by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital 5 years before it floated
- Google incorporated in 1998
- 30 million pages indexed in 1998
- 1 billion pages indexed in 2000
- Eric Schmidt named CEO in in 2001
- Acquired Blogger in 2003
- Adsense launched in 2003
- Gmail launched in 2004
- Google IPO in 2004
- 8 billion pages indexed in in 2004
- Acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion
- 1 Trillion pages indexed in in 2008
- Android announced in 2007
- Chrome launched in 2008
- 1.8 million shares given to Stanford University for its PageRank Patent sold by Stanford in 2005 for $336 million
- It currently runs over 1 million computer servers in data centers around the world
- Google search handles over 1 billion searches per day
- 7.2 billion daily page views
- 87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites
- Google’s global search market share is 85%
- Daily visitors to Google is 620 million
- Google.com’s worldwide ranking is number 1
- Revenue in 2000 was $19 million
- Profit in 200 was a loss of $14 million
- In 2009 Google’s revenue was nearly $23 billion
- In 2009 Google’s profit was $6.5 billion
- 97% is the percentage of revenue from advertising
- Stock price at its IPO in 2004 was $85
- Stock price in 2010 was $535
- Over 19,000 employees
- 37% are research staff
- 37% are sales staff
- A ‘Noogler’ is a new person at Google
- 45% of Google’s products are currently in Beta
- YouTube market share is 39.4%
- 270,000 words a minute are written on Blogger
- 146 million Gmail users
- Google analytics is used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites
- 400,000 new Android devices are activated every day
- 100 million activated Android devices
- 200,000 Apps available for the Android
- 4.5 billion Apps have been installed from the Android Market
- Google’s Android mobile operating system is the world’s leading smart phone platform surpassing Nokia and Apple with a 33% share
- 33 million Android operating systems were shipped in the the fourth quarter of 2010
- The Google Driverless car named the ‘Stanley’ won the DARPA Grand challenge and the $2 million in prize money from the US Department of Defense in 2005