15 amazing facts that trace the rise of Google

Google, the world's biggest search engine, celebrated its 15 birthday on September 4.

Let's take a look at some amazing facts that trace its history.

Source: The Guardian

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The first step

Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford when Page is assigned to Brin, a University of Michigan student planning to join Stanford, to show the campus, in 1995. Soon they start collaborating on a search engine called BackRub in 1996.

After a year, they decide to change the search engine's name to Google - a play on the word “googol", a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

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Mergers and acquisitions

On average, Google has bought more than one company every week since 2010.

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First doodle

The first doodle the company ever created was the symbol of Burning Man, a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada in the United States, in 1998. The idea behind this doodle was to let people know that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were attending the festival.

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Culinary delight

Usually it's big companies that have their own in-house chef, but Google hired one in 1999 when it had only 40 workers.

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Big jump

Charlie Ayers, the first chef, became the company's executive chef, managing a team of 150 workers across 10 restaurants at its base in Mountain View, California.

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Massive reach

Gmail, the email service of Google, is available in more than 50 languages, including Tagalog, Malayalam and Telugu.

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Raking in the cash

About 1,000 Google workers became overnight millionaires when the company went public in 2004.

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Massaging pays off

Bonnie Brown, a masseuse, used to give back rubs to employees for $450 a week in 1999, but became a millionaire when Google went public in 2004.

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Costly button

It has been estimated that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes users directly to the first search result, costs the tech giant about $100 million in lost ad revenue every year.

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Goat herder

To eat the grass and fertilise the soil at its California headquarters, the company hired 200 goats for seven days in 2009.

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Binary tweet

First official tweet sent by the tech giant was "I'm feeling lucky" in binary.

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Default payment

The tech giant pays $300 million a year to rival company Mozilla just to be the default search engine on web browser Firefox. Mozilla earns almost all of its revenue through Google.

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Owners' share

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the company, own just 16 per cent share of Google.

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Not a small pie

Although Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16 per cent share, this provides them a combined net worth of about $46 billion.

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Language barrier

The reason why Google's homepage is so sparse is because the company founders did not know HTML, the main language for creating web pages. The page did not even have a submit button for a long time, according to Business Insider.