Facts that you may have not known about Google's beginnings
1. Google started as a research project created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Page and Brin were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.
2. Google got its name by accident. The founders misspelled the word "googol," which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word was chosen to reflect the company's goal of organizing the massive amound of information that is available on the Internet.
3. The Google home page is so sparse because the founders did not know HTML and just wanted to create a quick interface.
4. At first, there was not even a "submit" button. Users had to hit the "return" key to generate a Google search.
5. Google's search technology is called PageRank (tm). It assigns an "importance" value to each page on the Web and gives it a rank. But that is not why the technology is called PageRank. In fact, it is named after Google co-founder Larry page.
6. Google's traffic doubled when they introduced their "Did you mean..." feature. This feature was made possible by a much-improved spell checker.
7. Google users apparently never feel "lucky," since the "I feel lucky" is almost never used. However, in trials it was discovered that users saw it as a comfort button and did not want it removed.
8. The search engine that Page and Brin were collaborating on was originally called BackRub, named for its ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given Web site.
9. Brin and Page would hang out at the Stanford computer science department's loading docks in hopes of borrowing newly-arrived PCs to use in their network.
10. Google's first data center was Larry Page's dorm room.
11. When Page and Brin tried to find buyers to license their search technology, one portal CEO told them "As long as we're 80 percent as good as our competitors, that's good enough. Our users don't really care about search."
12. The first major investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, wrote a check for $100,000 after seeing a quick demo on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto.
13. At first, there was no way to deposit the $100,000 check. It was made out to "Google Inc.," but there was no legal entity with that name. The check sat in Page's desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin rushed to set up a corporation and locate other investors.
14. Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, Calif. in September 1998. The door came with a remote control, since it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation.
