Google facts [ mind-blowing, crazy, amazing & interesting]

Hang on to your hats, this is going to get crazy. Have you ever wondered how Google's algorithm knows which site is the best for your query?

How about did you know that Google uses over 200 different signals? Hell, they even predicted the 2016 American presidential election.

“Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the American information technology industry, along with Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft.” [ via Wikipedia]

The origins of Google can be traced back to Stanford University in 1995. Sergey Brin, a student at Stanford, was assigned to tour Larry Page around while he was considering grad school there.

According to some stories, they clashed on practically everything during that initial meeting, but they formed a partnership the following year.

They created a search engine using links to determine the relevance of specific pages on the World Wide Web while working from their dorm rooms.

Google's brand is undoubtedly one of the most well-known on the planet, and only a person who lives in a cave far from the Internet and civilization hasn't heard of the corporation.

At the same time, the "good corporation's" operations are so broad that even its employees are unaware of all of their management's objectives.

We've compiled a list of  [ mind-blowing, crazy, amazing & interesting] facts that you should know about Google.

1. Google is your best friend?

So, you're at work, and you need to know what time it is in Tokyo.

Instead of doing a Google search for "Tokyo time", you should do "google time Tokyo".

This will bypass the whole search result page and get the correct time straight from its homepage.

I bet you didn't know that.

2. What's that song?

If you have music playing and aren't sure what the name of the song is, simply Google "name of song lyrics".

Easy as cake.

3. Need to contact someone important? Use Google!

Want to contact Mark Zuckerberg about a Facebook issue?

Simply type "Mark Zuckerberg" into the search bar and click on his profile.

You'll be greeted by an option to send him a message right within the search engine. Now that's cool!

4. Google is more popular than Bing and DuckDuckGo combined! (Or is it?)

I bet you didn't know that Google claims a whopping 64.6% of the search engine market.

Bing comes in second place with 12.5%.

The rest of the market share is divided among Yandex, Baidu, and other niche players.

Although the percentage may seem relatively high, it's actually down from 63% in October 2015.

5. Google’s secret mission statement.

No one really knows what Google’s mission statement is… but they do have a mission statement nonetheless – "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

So, to recap – there are more than 1 billion monthly active users on Gmail.

That's a lot of people.

Imagine if they all subscribed to your mailing list.

6. The Internet is ruled by Google.

Google was unavailable for 5 minutes on August 16, 2013, during which time global Internet usage fell by 40%.

This fact demonstrates the significance of Google in today's world.

When consumers can't find the website, they're looking for, they're less likely to use the internet.

7. Google has the world's largest website index.

Google has over 3 billion websites in its database.

When this index is produced, it will result in a 130-mile-high stack of paper. In less than half a second, Google searches all of these websites.

This demonstrates the importance of SEO because your audience will have to search through a big index of websites to reach your website.

8. Backrub was Google's original name.

The company later decided to change its name, and thus the name, Google was established.

After all, Google is a misspelling of the mathematical phrase for a one with a hundred zeros, Googel.

The company's aim would be reflected in this name, which is to make all information available to the entire world.

Don't you think that worked out rather well?

9. By accident, the Google domain was sold.

When Google accidentally put its own domain name up for sale in 2015, a guy bought it for $12.

Google reclaimed the domain and paid the buyer $6006.13, which is still a paltry sum considering it is GOOGLE, the most visited website on the internet.

When you look at the total, you'll notice that it's Google written in words.

Want to continue on surfing Google Facts? 

10. Google Maps is the most downloaded app in the world.

11. Gmail has 1.4 billion monthly active users.

12. YouTube has more than a billion unique visitors every month.

13. You can subscribe to receive updates on the business that you love to follow on Google + 

14. "I'm feeling lucky" button was once used by 54% of all google searches. Now, it's only used 0.6% of the time.

15. Google owns little over 70% of all search traffic.

16. Since the beginning, Google has had a pet-friendly office.

17. When Google went public in 2014, several of its employees became millionaires overnight.

18. Google is thought to process roughly 20 petabytes of data per day, or 20,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

19. It's estimated that Google earns nearly 90% of its revenue from advertising.

20. Google keeps its employees happy by offering free food. 

21. reCAPTCHA is a program developed by Google to teach computers how to read text. Google's computers learn how to recognize words scanned from books, even if they're twisted, by solving 200,000 million CAPTCHAs every day.

22. Since 2010, Google has purchased an average of more than one company every week.

23. Every month, the entire world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos, which is more than twice as long as contemporary humans have been alive.

24. Sergey Brin and Larry Page met by coincidence.

25. Since 2010, Google has acquired a new company per week on average.

26. The initial Google workplace was a rented garage.

27. When Gmail was first released on April Fool's Day, many people mistook it for a joke.

28. Every employee at Google has a 'Google Employee Number.' Page and Brin are assigned Google Employee Numbers 1 and 2.

29. Google searches are estimated to be approximately 2 million per second.

30. Employee benefits include free lunch, breakfast, dinner, haircuts, a state-of-the-art gym, and a nap pod (which can be considered as the greatest workplace invention for employees to take naps). But remember not every perk is free. Full-body massages and dry cleaning are just two of the costly extras.

31. Google is not only what it is today; it is also the mother of many of the big portals that exist today. Some of its former workers, including Gideon Yu, Marissa Mayer, and Megan Smith, have gone on to work for companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, and the United States Government's National Chief Technology Officer.

32. "I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010," Google's first tweet, which translates to "I'm feeling lucky."

33. For its Street View maps, Google has photographed 5 million miles of road.

34. "I'm feeling lucky" button is still one of Google's least-used features.