Google turns 23 –Here are the interesting facts you probably didn’t know

Google celebrates its 23rd birthday today, September 27, and the internet giant commemorated the event with an animated cake doodle as displayed on Google’s homepage. 

The foundation of Google can be traced back to Stanford University in 1995. Sergey Brin, a student at Stanford, was tasked to tour Larry Page around.  In the long run, the two Ph.D. students had the notion of building a prototype of a large-scale search engine, and twenty-three years later, Google became the World’s largest search engine born from the dream project.

The Company, which is headquartered in Mountain View, California, has grown to $420 Billion [MDRecord 2021], and “Every day, billions of searches are conducted on Google in more than 150 languages around the World, fulfilling its mission of making the World’s information accessible to everyone.

Consequently, to mark the Company’s anniversary, here are the 23 interesting facts you need to know about Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the founders of Google, and they met by chance

Larry Page, who was 22 at the time, had recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and is considering pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford University.  Brin, who was 21 and was already a Ph.D. candidate at the elite university, is assigned to show Page around the school. That was back in 1995, and it was a historic meeting of minds, as fate would have it.

BackRub was Google’s initial name

Page and Brin worked together on a groundbreaking “web crawler” concept named BackRub in 1996. Some assume that the early search engines’ moniker was a reference to backlink retrieval. BackRub, linked to Brin and Page’s initial ’90s-themed homepages, stayed on Stanford’s servers for more than a year until consuming too much traffic.

The name Google is a pun on the phrase “googol”

Page and Brin registered the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google on September 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, a play on “googol,” a mathematical word symbolized by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros. The name alluded to the potentially limitless amount of data that the duo’s budding search engine would analyze, interpret, and distribute. Many people have speculated that Google is a typo of Googol.

Google mail was launched on April fool day

Google debuted Gmail on April 1, 2004, in a portrayal phrased statement that was widely misinterpreted as a prank, playing on Silicon Valley’s longtime practice of performing April Fool’s Day pranks. It wasn’t Google Gulp that did it. It was a great double-fake that paved the way for a Google mainstay that today serves millions of users every day all around the World.

The Burning Man stick figure was Google’s first doodle

Page and Brin produced the first doodle in August 1998 as an out-of-office message to inform employees that they were leaving for the Burning Man event. Behind the second “o” in Google’s logo, the future billionaires placed the famous Man.

A rented garage was Google’s initial office

Google’s original workplace was in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California, according to legend. It came with a garage door remote control. The first employee of Google was Craig Silverstein, who stayed with the Company for over ten years before moving on to another startup, Khan Academy.

Google New York got its start in an 86th Street Starbucks

In the year 2000, Google unofficially launched its New York branch at a Starbucks in Manhattan. A one-person sales “team” was in charge. Thousands of “NYooglers” now work at the Company’s sleek, 2.9 million-square-foot New York headquarters, housed in a former Port Authority building on 111 8th Avenue.

Google’s first chef was a former caterer for The Grateful Dead

Chef Charlie Ayers was named Google’s executive chef in 1999 after winning a cook-off judged by the Company’s employees, who numbered only 40 at the time. He maintained the role for seven years. Ayers first cooked for the Grateful Dead for free entrance to their famed gigs but eventually took over as their caterer. He finally served 4,000 daily lunches and dinners at Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View, Calif, in ten cafés.

Since its inception, Google has had a pet-friendly office

Yoshka, a friendly Leonberger who came to work with his owner, Google’s senior vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle, was one of the Company’s first employees.

Around the Googleplex, Googlers ride multicolored “gBikes.

Google’s Googleplex office commuter bike program began with a small fleet of brilliant blue Huffys in 2007. Then there were the amusing “clown motorcycles.” More than 1,000 primary-colored, basket-equipped beach cruisers, called “gBikes,” now whizz about Google Mountain View’s two-mile length. Surprisingly, none of the bikes are equipped with locks. Employees “borrow” a set of wheels from a coworker. When they’re finished, they leave them by the office entrances for other Googlers to use.

Google image search was launched in a big way.

In 2001, the business launched Google Image search, which featured a staggering 250 million photos for cons.