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 technnology 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.
15. On June 7, 1999, Google announced $25 million in funding from the two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The venture capital firms were normally fierce rivals, but they both took seats on the board of directors. Even with all the new funding, when the board met, they sat around a ping pong table.
16. Google grew so quickly that its offices quickly filled up. Employees couldn't stand up at their desks without others tucking their chairs in first.
17. When Google moved to the Googleplex, their new headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., large rubber exercise balls were repurposed as highly mobile office chairs in an open, non-cubicle environment.
18. Google's first company chef, Charlie Ayers, previously cooked for the Grateful Dead.
19. USA Today named Google a "hot site" in September 1999.
20. On September 21, 1999, the beta label came off Google.com.
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