Google Office in Zurich

Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Google started as a research project at Stanford University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively (a combined 47 years old).

• Google’s index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of billions of web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.

• Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.

• Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth’s orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.

• Google has a world-class staff of more than 2,668 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.

• Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices, and has made it possible to enter a search using only one phone pad keystroke per letter, instead of multiple keystrokes.

• 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.

• The basis of Google’s search technology is called PageRankâ„¢, 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.

• Googlers are multifaceted. 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.

• Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

• Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

• How long it would take to do a manual search of Google’s 3 billion Web pages, at one minute a page?
  5,707 years

• How long it usually takes Google to search its database?
  0.5 seconds

Via here & Flickr

[tags] Google Office, Google, Zurich Office [/tags]