HOW OLD IS GOOGLE? GOOGLE’S BIRTHDAY AND OTHER INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD’S LARGEST SEARCH ENGINE

Few other companies have turned their name into an adjective. We no longer perform an internet search for something, we Google it. I don’t know of any other brand trademark that does that. Oh and it runs a search engine and has a few other interests too. But how old is Google? When it its birthday and what other things don’t we know about the search engine giant? Let’s find out!

HOW OLD IS GOOGLE?

Google hit 18 years old in 2016. Nobody actually knows, or admits when the specific date is but we know that it has a couple of attributable days of birth. The company showed a celebratory Google Doodle on 27 September but there is no tangible link to that date. In fact, the Google.com domain was registered on 15 September 1995, so may in fact be 19 and not 18.

A month later, the company filed for incorporation in California. Only then does it become an official company. It opened its first bank account on 4 September 1998 which means it could actually begin trading. So the answer could be 18 or 19 and one of two actual dates, or maybe more. Some say there are six ‘birthdates’ in total.

OTHER COOL GOOGLE FACTS

As you can imagine in an enterprise as massive as Google, there are some more interesting pieces of information floating around.

Google doesn’t like being an adjective for search

As mentioned at the top, we Google stuff online now rather than search for it but it seems the company itself doesn’t like the term. It apparently worried about the ubiquity of the term undermining the brand value they had worked so hard to build up.

Google buys at least one company per week

According to industry sources, Alphabet, the company behind Google buys a company per week and has done for many years. Some are brought into the fold and disappear forever while some keep their own brand name and operate under the brand umbrella.

There is a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex on Google Campus

As well as looking awesome, the model of the Tyrannosaurus Rex is to remind employees to always drive ahead and not allow the company to become stagnant and go extinct. It is quite the message wrapped up in a very attractive package!

The Tyrannosaurus Rex appears on the search page too

If you open Chrome without an internet connection you may see a little dinosaur next to the search box. Press the space bar as soon as you see it and you access a minigame where you run along as the dinosaur in a sort of Mario-esque jumping game.

The first Google Storage was made with Lego

Google’s datacenters are now some of the most advanced anywhere in the world. Yet the first ever storage server was made from a series of hard drives located within a chassis made entirely of Lego. It was called Backrub for some reason.

If you die while working for Google your family gets paid

If you die slaving away at your desk while you’re a Google employee, your family will receive 50% of your salary each year for a decade. As death benefits go, there is nothing else quite like it. Plus, if you have children, they get money until they come of age too.

When Google went down, so did 40% of the internet

Google crashed on 18 August 2013 and took five minutes to come back up. In that time, 40% of internet traffic went down with it. That’s a huge amount! While Google still remains dominant, it is unlikely that Google would ever go down again but if it did, it would not take quite as much traffic down with it.

A single search uses more computational power than the entire Apollo 11 project

Search for one single thing on the search engine and you use more computer power than the entire Apollo 11 mission. While lots of these kinds of statistics are thrown around, nothing brings it home like this one. Considering how many searches we perform each day, that’s a lot of men on the moon!

‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ costs Google millions of dollars per day

Hit the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ and you cost Google money. The search skips all the ads the company serves, depriving it of revenue. Think about that every time you’re feeling lucky.

Google hires goats

Most tech companies have some interesting hiring policies but this one is certainly different. As the Google campus is so huge with so much lawn, the company uses goats instead of lawnmowers to keep the grass in check. Around 200 goats visit for a week at a time to chew the grass and save gallons of lawnmower gas and lots of noise and pollution. Good move!

Got any Google facts we haven’t listed? Tell us about them below!