20 years ago, two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin started a company from a garage and today, this company is the most influential company in the digital era with an omniscient search engine which is now worth almost 600 billion dollars. Over the years, the company has expanded and introduced game changing technologies.
The search engine itself along with Gmail remained the top Google brands for a long time but the emergence of YouTube in 2005 which remains till today, the largest and most successful video platform in the world. Following this brand was Android, the mobile operating system that changed the face of mobile technology which was ruled by Nokia back in the day. Good times!
Google’s Android is now the most common and popular operating system integrated by many top smartphone brands ranging from Samsung, Htc, Sony, Huawei and eventually Nokia in 2017.
Here are 5 things about Google you would be surprised to know;
1. The Oxford dictionary introduced the word “Google” in 2006 as a verb. This was pretty amazing and understandable considering the fact that students across the world phrases like “Google it” instead of search so now the word “Google” means to search for something using the Google search engine.
2. The Google search engine is used to make over 2.4 million searches every 60 seconds.
3. Google was temporarily down for a few minutes on August 16th, 2013 during which the traffic worldwide dropped 40%.
4. The founders of Google offered to sale it for $1 million in 1999 which was rejected. Today the worth of the company is over 600 billion dollars.
5. Google was supposed to be named Googol which represents the number 10100 but a mistake in the corporation paperwork in which the founders accidently misspelled the name it has today.
Despite what people may say, it hasn’t been an easy road for Google as it has taken a lot of criticism over the decades mainly because of privacy which users have to sacrifice when using the search engine and results to a stampede of ads related to that user. This has been widely brought up over the years as Google chrome and android phones use the history of the user to place advertising and eventually violate our privacy.
Even with these criticisms, there is no stopping Google as it is going further to the top. Self-driving cars, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence are all the technologies of tomorrow that Google is working on as we speak. With its global expansion all around the world including its first investment in India, it is swiftly on its way to be the 3rd trillion dollar company after Apple and Amazon and the way things are going, it might just surpass them.
In the last decade the following are the companies that Google has acquired or invested in;
1. Motorola for $12.5 billion even though it was sold to Arris group for 15.7% shares in their stake.
2. Waze for $966 million
3. Htc for $1.1 billion
It has also introduced some other products and here are a few;
1. Google Wallet
2. Google Shopping Express for San Francisco
3. Deep dream
4. Auto draw
