To celebrate 25 years of one of the world’s most iconic organisations, we’re sharing a bunch of Google fun facts.
The date of 4 September 2023 marked 25 years since US computer scientists, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, officially founded one of the planet’s most powerful companies.
Happy birthday, Google! 💙❤️💛💙💚❤️
It’s been a wild ride during the last quarter of a century as the iconic tech company has turned from a fledgling internet search engine to a global behemoth.
Let’s bring the brand into focus with these Google fun facts. Credit: Mitchell Luo on Unsplash.
10 Google Fun Facts
In honour of the occasion, here is a series of intriguing Google fun facts:
1. As a startup, Google was initially known as BackRub – a nod to the search engine’s analysis of website backlinks to determine importance.
2. The company was soon renamed Google, inspired by the mathematical term googol, meaning a one followed by 100 zeroes.
3. In 1997, Page and Brin offered to sell Google to Yahoo for US$1 million, but the offer was rejected. As of this month, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has a market cap of US$1.7 trillion – ouch, Yahoo!
4. When Google launched Gmail on 1 April 2004 with some mind-bending features for its time, the service was widely thought to be an April Fool’s Day joke.
5. In 2006, the word ‘Google’ was officially recognised as a verb, having been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Gmail. It was no joke. Credit: Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash.
6. In that same year, Google acquired YouTube for a whopping US$1.65 billion.
7. The company’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California – known as Googleplex – includes a mind-boggling 190,000 square metres of office space.
8. Despite its huge size, Googleplex is only the company’s second largest site, as measured by square footage assemblage. Its Eighth Avenue building in New York City is the largest, with 270,000 square metres of usable office space.
9. As of 2023, Google’s market share in the search-engine world is a mammoth 92.82% – imagine that level of dominance!
10. There are roughly 8.5 billion Google searches across the globe each day – a tad more than the world’s entire population.
The name on everyone’s lips. Credit: BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash.
Google Easter Eggs
Have you heard about Google Easter eggs?
They’re a collection of fun features, hidden messages, inside jokes, and the like that users can find and interact with on the search engine.
Want an example? Search ‘chicxulub’ or ‘askew’.
Or even better, try ‘drop bear’, click on the dangling street sign-style image on the right-hand side of the page, and see what happens!
Oh, they have some in these offices. Credit: Adarsh Chauhan on Unsplash.
Google Fun Facts – Bonus Entry
Hunt & Hawk co-founder, Sonya Vanjicki, was lucky enough to visit Googleplex in 2017.
Sonya was wowed by the experience and added to our Google fun facts with this insight:
“There’s even a secret room at Googleplex that’s dedicated to special or secret projects – even top execs aren’t allowed to enter,” she said.
Sonya is pictured below in the site’s famous ball pit, which has links with the Burning Man art festival.
Sonya having an absolute ball.
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