Google’s 21st birthday: 21 facts about the company that are worth knowing

Google Doodles, commemorating noteworthy people and moments in history, have become very famous. The first ever Google Doodle was done in 1998, simply to notify that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinn had gone for a vacation to Burning Man. (Image: Google)

The second most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple Inc.), Google is valued at $309 billion. Here are a few facts about the Silicon Valley giant:

- Google was created by two Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.

- While the company was founded on September 4, no one can pinpoint a particular date for Google's birthdate. Since 2006, the celebration has been on September 27.

- Google is today considered as one of the 'Big Four' technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.

- Google was originally called BackRub in 1996. It is believed the name was a nod to the retrieving backlinks, based on the “web crawler” Page and Brin were working on during their Stanford days.

- On September 15, 1997, Page and Brin registered their project as Google. This was based on the mathematical term ‘googol’ which is one followed by 100 zeros.

- Google owns domains for the common misspellings of its own name, such as gooogle.com, gogle.com and googlr.com

- Google remained the world's most visited website in 2019, as per Lifewire. It is even the top search item on other search engines such as Bing.

- Google is so popular that it has entered the common lexicon. It was officially added as a verb to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2006, which defined it as "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web".

- Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.

- Google's headquarter is known as the Googleplex is based in California's Silicon Valley.

- Google was the first big tech company to offer free meals to employees. It also allows employees to bring in their dogs to work.

- Google employees in the US get death benefits which guarantee that the surviving spouse will receive 50 percent of their salary every year for the next decade.

- The Google logo that the company used from 1998 had the first capital G in green, subsequent logos have had the G in blue.

- The Google logo also goes colourless on days to mark major tragedies. It was first used in April 2010 to mark the air disaster that killed, among others, Polish President Lech Kaczyński. In 2018 it went colorless on the death of George H.W. Bush and in 2019 it did so on Memorial Day celebrated in the US .

- Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man stick figure created in August 1998 to mark the Burning Man festival. The doodle featured the iconic man behind the second O in Google’s logo.

- Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day that led to many people thinking that the application was a joke.

- Google’s search bar has a nifty feature that helps users with pronouncing big numbers. For instance, if you key in the number in this format: ‘17034=english’ and hit enter, the results will show: seventeen thousand thirty-four.

- Launched 2001, the Google Image Search was inspired by the worldwide interest in singer Jennifer Lopez’s 2000 Grammy outfit – the now iconic green Versace dress. At the time, there was no tool to help see it despite it being the most popular search query on Google.

- Google's Android operating system has gained leading market share in the majority of the countries. In the 14 years since Google acquired the brand, Android owns 87 percent of the Operating System market share worldwide.

- As part of its green initiative, Google rents 200 goats (plus herder and a border collie) to “mow” the weeds and brush around headquarters.

- In November 2017, Google bought 536 megawatts of wind power from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma, making its operations run on 100 percent renewable energy.