97 Fun Facts About Google

What did Google's founders do to bank their first cheque?

Incorporate: Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim made the $100,000 cheque out to 'Google Inc.', a company that didn't exist yet, so the pair had to set it up before they could bank the money.

Who co-founded Google alongside Larry Page?

Sergey Brin was the student showing Larry Page around campus when they met in 1995, and each later admitted finding the other obnoxious.

What was Google's search engine called when its founders first built it in 1996?

BackRub was named for the backlinks it counted to judge how important a page was; Google's own history says it was soon renamed, adding a relieved '(phew)'.

Google takes its name from 'googol', the number written as a 1 followed by how many zeros?

100 zeros make a googol, a word said to have been invented by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew; in 2004 the mathematician's great-niece talked of legal action against Google over the name.

At which university did Google's founders meet in 1995 and build their first search engine?

Stanford owned the patent on the ranking method the pair devised there; it licensed it to Google for 1.8 million shares, which it sold for $336 million.

Where was Google's first office when the company was founded?

A friend's garage in Menlo Park: its owner, Susan Wojcicki, rented it out to help cover her mortgage, then joined Google as employee number 16 and went on to run YouTube.

Who did Google's founders hire as chief executive in 2001, at their investors' urging?

Eric Schmidt left the top job at Novell to run Google for a decade; when Larry Page took over again in 2011, Schmidt tweeted: 'Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!'

Gmail kept which label on its logo from 2004 to 2009?

Beta: Gmail did not drop the tag until July 2009, and in its early invitation-only days invites were so scarce that they sold on eBay for as much as $150.

How much free storage did Gmail famously offer each user when it launched in 2004?

1 GB was hundreds of times the 2 to 4 MB that rival webmail services gave away, so generous that the April 1 announcement was widely taken for an April Fools' joke.

YouTube's three founders, whose site Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, had all worked at which company?

PayPal: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were early employees who grew wealthy when eBay bought it, then sold their own start-up to Google just 21 months after founding it.

Which Google product began at Sydney's Where 2 Technologies?

Maps: brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and their team first built it as a program to download, then turned to one that ran in the web browser when they pitched their work to Google, which bought the start-up.

Which Google product was unveiled in 2008 with a 38-page comic book drawn by Scott McCloud?

Chrome: the comic explained how the new browser worked, and copies posted early to Europe let a German blogger scan and publish it two days before the planned announcement.

Which Google software was first built as an operating system for digital cameras, before its start-up changed course in 2004?

Android: co-founder Andy Rubin later said 'the exact same operating system we built for cameras' became the phone software that Google bought in 2005.

Which Google social network shut down for consumers in April 2019 after a data-exposure bug?

Plus: Google+ had been due to close in August 2019, but a second bug that exposed 52.5 million users' profile data made Google bring the shutdown forward to April.

Google Translate's 2006 engine trained on European Parliament text and which other body's?

The United Nations: its meetings are routinely translated by people into six languages, which gave Google's 2006 statistical engine a vast stock of matched text to learn from.

Google's suite of public hosting services, which began with App Engine in 2008, is formally called Google what?

Cloud Platform grew out of App Engine, and Google poured money into it for years to compete with Amazon and Microsoft: its cloud division did not report a profit until early 2023.

Which Google product launched in five US cities in 2007 and has since put cameras on snowmobiles, tricycles and backpacks?

Street View cars also scooped up data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as they drove past, which Google admitted in 2010 after German regulators asked to audit what the cars collected.

In what year did Google fold itself into a new parent, Alphabet Inc.?

Google announced Alphabet in August 2015 and completed the reorganisation on October 2, 2015, so its moonshot units could sit beside Google rather than inside it.

What nickname does Google's headquarters campus at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway go by?

The Googleplex has had its fields mown by goats: in spring 2009 Google brought in a herd instead of lawnmowers, calling it a lower-carbon way to cut the grass.

What is Google's unofficial corporate motto that guided the company for years?

It appeared in the 2004 IPO prospectus; when Alphabet was formed its own code of conduct went with 'Do the right thing' instead.

What happens when you search 'do a barrel roll' on Google?

The whole page spins 360 degrees, and searching 'z or r twice' does the same: that was the button command for the manoeuvre in Nintendo's Star Fox 64.

Which arcade classic became Google's first playable Doodle in May 2010?

Pac-Man: the playable logo marked the arcade game's 30th anniversary, copying its sounds and even its level-256 glitch, and proved so popular that Google gave it a permanent home.

Which pixelated animal stars in the endless-runner game Google's browser offers when you're offline?

A Tyrannosaurus rex: the designers picked a dinosaur as a joke about being thrown back to the 'prehistoric age' before Wi-Fi, and code-named the game Project Bolan after the singer of the band T. Rex.

Which Alphabet subsidiary was renamed from Google Life Sciences in December 2015?

Verily inherited Google's smart contact lens, meant to read a diabetic's glucose levels from tears, and shelved the project in 2018.

In what city is Google's headquarters located?

Mountain View: Google leased the 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway campus from Silicon Graphics in 2003 and bought it outright in 2006 for about $319 million.

Ruth Kedar's 1999 Google logo used primary colours except for a secondary colour on which letter?

The l: Kedar gave that one letter green, a secondary colour, saying it 'brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules'.

Charlie Ayers, Google's first executive chef, had earlier cooked for which rock band?

Grateful Dead: Ayers had cooked for the band before joining Google in 1999; by the time he left in 2006 his team served about 4,000 lunches and dinners a day across ten campus cafes.

Which London AI research lab did Google acquire in 2014?

DeepMind: as part of the deal Google agreed to set up an artificial intelligence ethics board, and Facebook had reportedly tried and failed to buy the lab a year earlier.

Which crowdsourced navigation app from Israel did Google buy in June 2013?

Waze began in 2006 as FreeMap Israel; after the purchase its team stayed in Israel and the app kept running as a product of its own.

Which handset maker's 17,000 patents led Google to agree a $12.5 billion takeover in 2011?

Motorola Mobility: Google announced the $12.5 billion deal in August 2011, then sold the handset business to Lenovo in 2014 for $2.91 billion while keeping most of the patents.

Under what name did Google launch its AI chatbot in 2023, before renaming it Gemini?

Bard: its first promotional demo got a fact about the James Webb telescope wrong, wiping about $100 billion off Alphabet's value in a day; it was renamed Gemini in February 2024.

Google's first Doodle, in 1998, was an out-of-office note saying the founders had gone to which event?

Burning Man: the founders tucked the festival's stick-figure logo behind the second 'o' on August 30, 1998, so users would know why nobody was around if the servers crashed.

Which intern drew the 2000 Bastille Day Doodle and became Google's first chief doodler?

Dennis Hwang, then a webmaster intern, was asked to draw the Bastille Day Doodle in July 2000; it was so well received that he became Google's first full-time doodler.

What is Google's primary source of revenue?

Advertising made up 96% of Google's revenue in 2011 and, for all the growth of its cloud business since, still 73% in 2025.

What was the name of Google's head-mounted wearable computer announced in 2012?

Google Glass cost its early 'Explorers' $1,500, but some bars and restaurants banned the camera-equipped headset over privacy worries, and Google halted sales in January 2015.

Which line of Google-designed smartphones launched in October 2016?

Pixel: the phones replaced the Nexus line and were sold as Google's own design, though the first two generations were developed with HTC engineers working on contract.

Which web-based word processor, bought by Google in 2006, became the foundation of Google Docs?

Writely began as an experiment in putting a word processor inside a web browser; its creator recalls most of Google using it within a month of the purchase.

Who became Google's CEO in 2015?

Sundar Pichai had been tipped a year earlier for Microsoft's top job, which went to Satya Nadella; in December 2019 he became chief executive of Alphabet as well.

What self-driving car project spun out of Google in 2016?

Waymo: the year before the spin-out, one of its cars with no steering wheel or pedals took a legally blind man through Austin, Texas, with no test driver aboard.

Searching Google for which word brings the cheeky reply 'Did you mean: nag a ram'?

Anagram: the suggestion simply shuffles the word's own letters, and searching 'recursion' plays a similar trick, asking 'Did you mean: recursion' over and over.

What is Google's systems programming language, released in 2009?

Go was barely out when Francis McCabe, who had spent ten years on an older language called Go!, asked Google to change the name; Google kept it.

Which social network, launched by a Google engineer in 2004, became hugely popular in Brazil and India?

Orkut, named after the Google engineer who built it, drew so many Brazilian users that in 2008 Google handed the whole service to its Brazil office to run.

Which Google AI system beat champion Lee Sedol at an ancient board game in Seoul in 2016?

AlphaGo won 4-1; Lee Sedol's single victory came in game four, and in 2019 he retired, calling AI 'an entity that cannot be defeated'.

What Google Easter egg greets a search for 'askew'?

The results page tilts slightly to the right, acting out the word's own meaning; searching 'tilt' used to trigger the same lean.

Which thermostat maker, bought by Google in 2014, became its smart-home brand in 2019?

Nest was founded by two former Apple engineers, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers; when Google made it the brand for all its home gadgets in 2019, the Google Home Hub was renamed the Nest Hub.

Which web analytics company did Google buy in 2005 and relaunch as Google Analytics?

Urchin Software, bought in April 2005, was relaunched as the free Google Analytics that November, with Urchin's tracking code living on in the 'utm' campaign parameters.

What is the name of Google's quantum computing processor that claimed 'quantum supremacy' in 2019?

Sycamore took 200 seconds over a task Google said would keep the best supercomputer busy for 10,000 years, though IBM countered that its own machine could do it in two and a half days.

Whose green Versace dress at the Grammys drew so many searches that Google built Image Search?

Jennifer Lopez's gown became the most popular search query Google had yet seen, but its results back then were only pages of text links.

Which animals did Google once hire by the herd to mow the fields at its California headquarters?

Goats, about 200 of them, spent a week in spring 2009 grazing Google's fields in place of mowers. They came from a firm called California Grazing.

Google's code of conduct declares 'we're a dog company' and says which visiting pets would be stressed out?

Cats get a polite brush-off in the code's Dog Policy, which says: 'We like cats, but we're a dog company.' Staff may bring a dog to the office.

Larry Page built a working inkjet printer from which toy as a University of Michigan student?

Lego bricks formed the body of the printer, which Page built to print large posters cheaply after reverse-engineering an ink cartridge.

Until 2019, Google named major versions of its phone software after which kind of food?

Desserts were the idea of project manager Ryan Gibson. The names ran from Cupcake to Pie, then gave way to plain numbers.

Which number does Google give for 'the answer to life, the universe and everything', after Douglas Adams?

42 is what the computer Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years working out in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Which 2013 comedy stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as laid-off salesmen competing for jobs at Google?

The Internship began when Vince Vaughn watched a 60 Minutes segment on Google's work culture and took the idea to director Shawn Levy.

Searching Google Images for which Atari arcade game once turned the results into a playable level?

Breakout used the gallery of image results as its bricks. Searching 'atari breakout', or just the single word, was enough to start a game.

Which tech founder personally invested about $250,000 in Google during the company's first year?

Jeff Bezos, then running a young Amazon, got 3.3 million shares for his money. That stake would have been worth about $3.1 billion by 2017.

Which Google homepage button was built to skip the results page and go straight to the first hit?

I'm Feeling Lucky sends searchers past the results page entirely. A 2007 estimate put the cost to Google at $110 million a year in lost revenue.

Which name, shared with a crewed NASA programme, did Google give its AI models in December 2023?

Gemini is Latin for twins, chosen to celebrate the merger of Google's two big AI labs as well as to salute NASA's Project Gemini.

Which piece of punctuation sat at the end of Google's logo during the company's first year?

An exclamation mark arrived with a change of typeface, mimicking the Yahoo! logo, then was dropped from the design Ruth Kedar developed in May 1999.

Google's 2002 April Fools' page claimed its results were ranked by clusters of which trained birds?

Pigeons powered 'PigeonRank', a spoof of Google's real PageRank system that solemnly credited psychologist B. F. Skinner's experiments as its inspiration.

Google's 2007 April Fools' hoax TiSP promised free broadband through which household fixture?

The toilet was the gateway: users were told to flush a weighted fibre-optic cable down it and let the sewers carry their connection.

Which maker of step-counting wristbands did Google finish buying in 2021 for about $2.1 billion?

Fitbit joined Google's hardware division only after American and European regulators examined what the deal meant for users' personal data.

Searching Google for which programming term prompts a joke 'Did you mean' naming the very same word?

Recursion is a routine that calls itself, so the suggestion links to the same search over and over. Searching 'groundhog day' does the same.

What name describes a two-word Google search with exactly one result, the subject of a Dave Gorman show?

Googlewhack was coined by Gary Stock in 2002. Comedian Dave Gorman travelled the world to meet people who had written such pages, then made it a bestseller.

Google Scholar's motto, 'Stand on the shoulders of giants', echoes a line made famous by which English scientist?

Isaac Newton used the image in a 1675 letter to his rival Robert Hooke, though the idea is credited to the 12th-century scholar Bernard of Chartres.

Which game-streaming service did Google close in 2023, refunding players for games and hardware?

Stadia lasted just over three years and never won enough players. A parting software update let its controller work over Bluetooth with other devices.

Google backed a $20 million prize, never claimed, for the first private team to land a rover where?

The Moon contest required a rover to travel 500 metres and beam back high-definition video. It expired in 2018 with no team having launched.

Which US city renamed itself 'Google' for a month in 2010, hoping to win the company's fibre broadband?

Topeka got its reply on April Fools' Day, when Google announced it was taking the city's name in return and swapped the logo on its home page.

Which web address did Alphabet adopt while the obvious dot-com belonged to a BMW division?

abc.xyz uses a domain ending that only came into being in 2014. The alphabet.com address was already owned by a fleet-management arm of the carmaker.

Which diner-rated restaurant guide, founded in New York in 1979, did Google own from 2011 until 2018?

Zagat began when Tim and Nina Zagat surveyed their friends about New York restaurants. Google sold it on to the restaurant app The Infatuation.

Which Alphabet project, shut down in 2021, beamed internet to remote regions from the stratosphere?

Loon took its name from the balloons it flew 18 to 25 km up. They carried emergency phone coverage to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Which early Google hire, its first woman software engineer, left in 2012 to run Yahoo?

Marissa Mayer joined in 1999 as employee number 20. She was Yahoo's chief executive for five years, until its business was sold to Verizon.

Which 'Godfather of AI' quit Google in 2023 so he could speak freely about the technology's risks?

Geoffrey Hinton had split his time between Google and the University of Toronto for a decade. A year after leaving, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Which 'father of the internet' spent two decades at Google with the job title Chief Internet Evangelist?

Vint Cerf earned the nickname in the 1970s by co-designing TCP/IP, the rules that let separate computer networks talk to one another.

Which guitar pioneer's 96th birthday did Google celebrate with a Doodle whose strings could be strummed?

Les Paul's doodle could be played with the mouse or the keyboard, and American users could record a 30-second tune and send it on as a link.

A 'Google bomb' made which US president's official biography the top result for 'miserable failure'?

George W. Bush stayed top for the insult until January 2007, when Google tweaked its algorithm to defuse the prank and others like it.

Artist Simon Weckert pulled 99 phones along a road in a handcart to make Google Maps show what?

A traffic jam appeared because the app read 99 slow phones as 99 crawling cars, turning a green road red and steering real drivers elsewhere.

After a 2010 row over censorship, Google began sending mainland China searches to a site based where?

Hong Kong then had its own courts and was exempt from most mainland censorship rules, so searches sent to google.com.hk came back unfiltered.

Which capital's Grand Canal Dock became a tech hub after Google based its European headquarters there?

Dublin's docklands went on to house Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Airbnb too, and tech firms came to employ about 7,000 people in the area.

Google Maps began as a program built by Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at a start-up in which city?

Sydney was home to Where 2 Technologies. Google bought the firm, hired all four of the program's creators and rebuilt their work as a web app.

Google's main campus was built for which computer maker, whose workstation appears in Jurassic Park?

Silicon Graphics first leased its former offices to Google in 2003, then sold them three years later in a $319 million property deal.

Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote Google a $100,000 cheque before it legally existed, co-founded which computer maker?

Sun Microsystems grew out of a networked workstation Bechtolsheim designed as a student, and he served as its chief hardware designer.

George Bell, chief executive of which 1990s web portal, turned down the chance to buy Google for $750,000?

Excite was first offered Google for $1 million in early 1999. One of its own investors, Vinod Khosla, haggled the price down, and Bell still said no.

Google's IPO filing sought to raise $2,718,281,828, a figure taken from which mathematical constant?

Euler's number, written e, begins 2.718281828. Google also once ran a recruiting billboard that hid a puzzle in the same constant's digits.

Which Google service did engineer Krishna Bharat create after the September 11 attacks to keep up with events?

Google News was among the company's first ventures beyond plain web search. It grew to gather stories from tens of thousands of publishers.

Which Google app has a 'Make this a quiz' switch that lets teachers add an answer key and auto-grade?

Google Forms is at heart a survey tool. Switching on quiz mode adds an answer key, point values and automatic feedback for each question.

Which Google web-feed service drew a petition of over 100,000 signatures when it was axed in 2013?

Google Reader had a loyal but declining following, the company said. Its end has been called a defining moment in the shift away from an independent web.

Under which brand did Google sell phones built by partners such as HTC, Samsung and LG, starting in 2010?

Nexus phones ran Google's software with little or no tinkering by the manufacturer. The first, the Nexus One, was made by HTC.

Which cheap material gave its name to the VR viewer Google handed to developers in 2014?

Cardboard viewers used a phone as the screen, keeping virtual reality cheap. Every attendee at Google's 2014 developer conference went home with one.

Which illness did Google start tracking through search queries in 2008, only to overestimate it badly?

Influenza searches fooled the model: for one stretch of the 2012 season it predicted twice as many doctor visits as health officials recorded.

Which publishing tool, launched by future Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, did Google buy in 2003?

Blogger is credited with popularising blogging as one of the first tools built just for it. Williams left Google the following year.

Which maker of the BigDog and Atlas robots did Google own from 2013 until selling it to Japan's SoftBank?

Boston Dynamics changed hands again within a few years. SoftBank sold an 80% stake to carmaker Hyundai for about $880 million.

The original reCAPTCHA test, which Google bought in 2009, used people's typed answers to help do what?

Digitise old books: each puzzle paired a known word with one that scanners could not read, and the typed answers helped transcribe The New York Times archive.

Google's Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared which 2024 Nobel Prize for an AI that predicts protein shapes?

Chemistry, not medicine, took the prize. Their system went on to predict the structures of around 200 million proteins, nearly every one known to science.

Which Google chatbot did engineer Blake Lemoine claim in 2022 had become sentient, costing him his job?

LaMDA, Lemoine said, had even asked him to hire it a lawyer. Google called his claims wholly unfounded, and most scientists rejected them too.

Which neural-network design behind modern chatbots did Google researchers introduce in 'Attention Is All You Need'?

The transformer is the 'T' in ChatGPT. The paper's title riffs on a Beatles song, and all eight of its authors later left Google.

Which container-management system, announced by Google in 2014, takes its name from the Greek for 'helmsman'?

Kubernetes shares its Greek root with 'cybernetics' and 'governor'. Its seven-spoked wheel logo nods to the Star Trek character Seven of Nine.