47 Fun Facts About Google

In what year was Google incorporated?

Google was incorporated in 1998, with the papers signed on September 4, two years after Page and Brin began the search project as Ph.D. research.

Who co-founded Google alongside Larry Page?

The two still control 56% of shareholder voting power through super-voting stock while owning about 14% of the shares.

What did the founders call their search engine when they built it in 1996?

The name referred to the system's analysis of backlinks; it became Google in 1997.

The name 'Google' is a play on what mathematical term?

Googol, 10 to the 100th, was misspelled into Google; the heirs of Edward Kasner, who popularised the term, considered suing over the name in 2004 but never filed.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as Ph.D. students in 1995 and built their 'BackRub' search prototype at which university?

Stanford is where Page and Brin met in 1995; their 1996 research prototype, BackRub, ranked pages by counting the links pointing at them.

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

Google's first office was a friend's garage in Menlo Park, rented from Susan Wojcicki, who later became a Google executive and CEO of YouTube.

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

Eric Schmidt, then chief executive of Novell, became Google's CEO in August 2001 at the urging of investors Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia; Larry Page moved to president of products.

In what year did Google launch Gmail?

It was announced on April 1 as an invitation-only beta and did not drop the beta label until 2009.

How much free storage did Gmail famously offer when it launched as a beta?

The figure was so generous for the era that many assumed the announcement was an April Fools' prank.

How much did Google pay to acquire YouTube in 2006?

$1.65 billion in Google stock bought YouTube; the deal closed in November 2006, and the founders were ex-PayPal employees who had grown rich in the eBay buyout.

What year was Google Maps launched?

2005 was the year: Google Maps launched on February 8, 2005, built on work by Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies, which Google acquired in 2004.

What is the name of Google's web browser, launched in 2008?

The Windows-only beta shipped in 43 languages; by 2026 it held about 71% of worldwide usage share.

What mobile operating system does Google develop?

Android: Google bought Android Inc. in July 2005, and the first Android phone, the HTC Dream sold as the T-Mobile G1, shipped in October 2008.

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

Google+ (Plus) launched in June 2011 as a Facebook rival and never caught on; after the data-exposure bug its API closed in March 2019 and the consumer service shut on April 2.

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

The United Nations: Google's 2006 statistical engine learned from millions of words of UN and European Parliament proceedings, which exist as aligned translations in many languages.

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

Google Cloud Platform grew from App Engine, previewed in April 2008 and generally available in September 2011; Compute Engine virtual machines followed in 2012.

Which Google product, launched in five US cities in 2007, lets users explore roads through panoramic imagery shot from camera cars?

Street View launched in five US cities in 2007 and has since used snowmobiles, trolleys and backpack rigs to reach places cars cannot.

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 mashes 'Google' with 'complex', as in a complex of buildings, with a wink at a famously enormous number.

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; searching 'Z or R twice' does the same, a nod to the button combo Peppy Hare demands in Nintendo's Star Fox 64.

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

Pac-Man: built with Namco for the game's 30th anniversary on May 21, 2010, the doodle was so popular that Google kept it permanently at google.com/pacman.

Which pixelated animal stars in Chrome's offline endless-runner game?

Its designer named the character the 'Lonely T-Rex'; on the browser's 10th birthday in 2018 a cake and party hat were added as an Easter egg.

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

Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) is Alphabet's life sciences subsidiary. It focuses on using technology to improve health outcomes. Calico is a separate Alphabet subsidiary focused on aging and longevity research.

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 green 'l' was meant to signal that Google doesn't follow the rules; the wordmark used the serif font Catull until 2015.

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 AI research lab did Google acquire in 2014 for approximately $500 million?

Google acquired DeepMind Technologies, the London AI lab founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, in January 2014 for approximately $500 million.

Which navigation app did Google acquire in 2013 for about $1 billion?

Waze, the Israeli crowdsourced navigation app that began as FreeMap Israel in 2006, joined Google in June 2013 and kept running as a separate product alongside Google Maps.

Which handset maker's 17,000 patents led Google to pay $12.5 billion for it 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.

What was the name of Google's AI chatbot launched in 2023 to compete with ChatGPT?

Bard: employees criticised it internally before the 2023 launch, and its demo's slip about the James Webb telescope knocked about $100 billion off Alphabet's value; it was renamed Gemini in February 2024.

What did the very first Google Doodle depict?

The Burning Man stick figure, placed behind the second 'o' on August 30, 1998, was an out-of-office note: the founders were at the Nevada festival and wanted users to know why nobody would fix a crash.

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 brought in about 76% of Alphabet's revenue in 2024 (roughly $265 billion of $350 billion), down from 96% in 2011 as cloud and hardware grew.

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

Google Glass was announced in April 2012 and sold to developers as the Explorer Edition in 2013; privacy worries led Google to end consumer sales in January 2015, leaving only an Enterprise Edition.

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

Pixel: the first Pixel and Pixel XL launched in October 2016, replacing the partner-built Nexus phones, with Google designing the hardware itself for the first time.

Which company did Google acquire in 2006 that became Google Docs?

Google acquired Writely, a web-based word processor, in March 2006. It became the foundation for Google Docs, later part of Google Workspace alongside Sheets and Slides.

Who became Google's CEO in 2015?

He was floated for Microsoft's top job in 2014, which went to Satya Nadella, and added the Alphabet CEO title in December 2019.

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

Waymo, a portmanteau of 'Way forward in Mobility', was spun out of Google's Self-Driving Car Project in December 2016 as an Alphabet subsidiary and launched a commercial robotaxi service in Phoenix in 2018.

What year did Google's search index first reach 1 billion web pages?

The June 2000 announcement claimed the largest index on the Internet, with 560 million fully indexed pages plus partially indexed URLs.

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

Go was announced on November 10, 2009; that day Francis McCabe, creator of an older language called Go!, asked Google to rename it, and Renee French's gopher mascot debuted with the launch.

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

Orkut, named after Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, launched in January 2004; most of its users were in Brazil and India by the time Google shut it down in September 2014.

What was the codename of Google's AI system that beat the world Go champion in 2016?

AlphaGo won 4-1 in Seoul in March 2016 against 9-dan professional Lee Sedol, whose game-four victory was the only game AlphaGo lost in a formal match before it retired in 2017.

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

The results page tilts slightly to the right, a few degrees clockwise; 'tilt' triggered the same effect when the Easter egg appeared in 2011 but was later dropped.

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

Nest, the thermostat maker Google bought for $3.2 billion in January 2014, became the Google Nest brand for smart-home devices in May 2019, when 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?

Google's Sycamore processor achieved what Google called 'quantum supremacy' in October 2019, performing a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer approximately 10,000 years.