Facts about Google: With its 2013 revenue of close to $60 billion and with an average of 40,000 search queries being conducted on its site each second, Google is undeniably a wildly successful company. However, like all business giants, Google began humbly with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then Ph.D. students at Stanford University, aiming “to organize the world’s information.”
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What began as a research project later branched out into all sorts of Internet-related services and raised funding that allowed the company to acquire dozens of other companies. These include YouTube, DoubleClick, Keyhole, Inc. (now “Google Earth”), and GrandCentral (now “Google Voice”), among others. And not surprisingly, because the company has grown so huge, many facts about it have been buried in its own avalanche of information.
Here are ten interesting facts about Google that most people aren’t aware of:
10. Google got its name via a typo.
Google is so widely used that its name has been recognized as a verb, meaning “to search for information on the Internet using the search engine Google.” However, this name was actually conceptualized by accident in 1996. According to David Koller from Stanford University, several Google pioneers, including founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were discussing possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology they had been working on. Sean Anderson suggested “googolplex” (10100) to allude to the large amount of data the search engine would be dealing with, and Page suggested that they work with the shortened form, “googol”. Anderson then conducted a search to determine if the word was still available on the Internet domain name registry, but he mistakenly typed in “google.com”. That error turned out to be fortuitous as Page liked the name, and within hours, the founders had registered “Google”.
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