Vikrant’s World

Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Google started as a research project at Stanford University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively (a combined 47 years old).

Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of billions of web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.

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

Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth’s orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.

Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.

Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices, and has made it possible to enter a search using only one phone pad keystroke per letter, instead of multiple keystrokes.

Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world’s largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.

The basis of Google’s search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an “importance” value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that’s not why it’s called PageRank. It’s actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

Googlers are multifaceted. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company’s chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.

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

Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

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

The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’.

Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

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.

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

Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88

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

When Google started we indexed 25,000 web pages – today we index billions. Each time we index the web it’s grown by 10 to 25%.

As the web grows, search becomes more important. It’s like a library – the bigger the library, the more important the index.

20 to 25% of Google queries have never been searched before.

Google’s PageRank algorithm uses more than 200 signals to determine the rank of a website.

iGoogle was our fastest growing product last year (2006). People have personalized their iGoogle homepages with over 10,000 free gadgets.

The Google Book Search index includes books in over 90 languages.

Google’s machine translation service is available in 12 languages.

Google operates in 112 languages including Breton, Reto-Romanic, Catalan, Kurdish, Frisian and Gaelic.

Universities in Rwanda, Kenya, Japan, Egypt, Ireland, the Ukraine, Michigan and Arizona are all using Google Apps for Education.

In 2007 Google gave free bicycles to all its employees in Europe.

Google’s San Francisco shuttle bus service is the biggest of any company in the area. One shared car provides as much transportation as 20 privately owned cars.

Google has the largest corporate solar panel installation in the US.

Of the $10.6bn Google generated in revenue last year, $3bn was handed back to our publishing partners through AdSense.

In the first quarter of this year Google generated over $1bn in revenues from our partners.

Google’s immortal cookie:
Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it’s years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines ; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don’t already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.

Google records everything they can:
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as “IP delivery based on geolocation.”

Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.

Google won’t say why they need this data:
Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.

Google hires spooks:
Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.

Google’s toolbar is spyware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google’s free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that’s only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google’s toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you’d like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.

Google’s cache copy is illegal:
Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google’s cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a “noarchive” meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don’t. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google’s cache. The cache copy should be “opt-in” for webmasters, not “opt-out.”

Google is not your friend:
By now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. Webmasters cannot avoid seeking Google’s approval these days, assuming they want to increase traffic to their site. If they try to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google’s semi-secret algorithms, they may find themselves penalized by Google, and their traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time Google doesn’t even answer email from webmasters.

Google is a privacy time bomb:
With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved.