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19 Random Facts About Google As It Celebrates Its 19th Birthday

Image: Recode

You can hate the entire world but never Google. It is the savior of your terrible and horrible bad days and the partner of your joyous celebrations. Imagine the horrors of Google disappearing, leaving you stranded in the middle of nowhere. 19 years ago, the world did not have Google until Sergey Brin and Larry Page came together to create this search engine.

The company just celebrated its birthday yesterday and surprised us all with a brilliant google doodle with 19 different surprises in the birthday spinner.

A 19-year-old is an adult. But in the tech years, a super mature, in fact, more of an elderly adult. Our favorite company has many not-so-secret secrets. A lot of them are popular while some other remain lesser known. We picked 19 random facts about Google to honor its 19th birthday as we got the Doodle treat too, right?

1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google in 1998, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. After celebrating the birthday on any random September day, September 27 is a fixed date of birthday celebrations since 2006.

2. The first Google Doodle was meant to be an error message dedicated to the Burning Man festival. Designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin themselves, it would appear in case of a server crash.

Image: The Atlantic

3. Google has over 72,000 employees around the globe.

4. Google’s first tweet ever was “I’m feeling lucky” written in binary code.

5. Google owns all domains of the misspellings of its name like Gooogle.com, Gogle.com, Googlr.com, and much more. Try a few maybe? 466453.com corresponds to the numbers that spell out Google on a phone keypad, and surprise, Google owns it as well!

6. Google’s search engine market share as of August 2017 is 91.64 percent.

7. The “I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google US$110 million per year, as it bypasses all ads.

8. The name of Google was based on “googol,” the number one followed by a hundred zeroes. It represents the infinite search result showed by the search engine.

9. Google hired a camel to create the Street View of a desert.

10. Have a look at the original Google.com from Dec. 2, 1998.

Image: Google

11. Google intends to scan all known existing 129 million unique books before 2020.

12. The hundreds of billions of web pages in Google Search index are over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.

13. On August 16, 2013, Google went down for 5 minutes. In that time, the global internet traffic dropped by 40%.

14. The first April Fool’s day joke from Google came on April 1, 2000, when the company created the MentalPlex hoax inviting users to let Google read their minds.

15. Google was started in Susan Wojcicki’s garage, now the CEO of YouTube.

16. Five of the top 10 mobile app companies in America are owned by Google like YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Search.

17. Google’s purchase of YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion was the biggest purchase of that time.

18. The original name of Google was in fact “BackRub” that later became “googol.”

19. The Google founder tried to sell the company to Excel in 1999 for $1 million. The offer was turned down!

Here is a bonus fact:

Google has a version of their site translated into the language of the Klingons from Star Trek.

Happy cake. Sorry, Happy Doodles!

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