1. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.
2. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
3. Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.
4. Interesting thing about Gmail is that it was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
5. It consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.
6. The Google search engine receives an amazing one billion search requests per day.
7. Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of 8 billion web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.
8. Google has a funny tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day was a joke.
9. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world that includes the lonely Antarctica as well.
10. Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.
11. Google has a world-class staff of more than 15000 full-time employees - Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex located at Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway.
12. Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.
13. Another funny fact is that the "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. It was a comfort button which actually takes to the first web page returned by the search results.
14. Google use the unique 20%/5% rules. That is ,if at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.
15. Employees in Google are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. That's why we have such amazing products like GMail, Google News and Orkut now.
16. Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.
17. The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
18. Googlers are people from different background. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health, is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.
19. Google’s Orkut is most popular in Brazil and India. It was the brainchild of a Google engineer who was given free reign to run with it.
20. In a 2006 report of the world's richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #26 with a net worth of $12.9 billion, and Larry Page was #27 with a net worth of $12.8 billion
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