10 amazing facts about Google

Ever imagined your life without Google? Today, Google as a search engine has become our primary source of information. There must be hardly anyone today who knows the internet but is not familiar with Google. The underlying question is, how much do you know about your favorite search engine? There are many things known through different sources. Here I’m going to list down 10 amazing facts worth knowing if you have made Google a part of your daily lives.

Google is googol

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The name of the search engine originated from the word ‘googol’ i.e. 1 followed by 100 zeros signifying that Google was designed to provide large sources of information.

Planning to commit suicide? Wait! Google has your back.

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If you are planning to commit suicide, & finding ways online by typing the words ‘I want to commit suicide’, ‘commit suicide’ or similar phrases on Google, before any relevant search result, Google will provide you the suicide helpline number of your country. This might induce a second thought in the person’s mind & there is a chance that he/she might call the helpline & save himself from dying.

Meet Google’s own pet – A Dinosaur!

Image by flickr

Google has officially declared that it has a full replica of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex (T-rex) as a pet which lives outside their California Mountain View headquarters. With its saber-sized teeth and “thunder lizard” moniker, the T-rex has really been badly misunderstood through the ages – says Google. The Google version of the T-rex is a cute, good-hearted, and a playful puppy! Hence, Google has also made the T-rex running game on its search page when it goes offline. There are two things Google wants to convey through its pet dinosaur – One that it reminds the employees not to let Google go extinct & second that no one has anything to fear from Google.

You can play the famous Atari breakout game in the Google image search page

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Go to Google images page & type Atari Breakout. All the images will be converted into tiles & you can easily play the game by moving your cursor as the slider. Google has added a playable version of the early Atari game Breakout to its Image Search system to celebrate the game’s 37th birthday.

Google has been acquiring on an average, one company every week since 2010

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The true strength of the company lies in the small start-ups acquired by Google since 2010. In total, there are about 285 companies acquired by Google till August 2017. After the restructuring of the company in 2015, Alphabet is the group which oversees other subsidiary companies with Google being a part of the larger entity.

Benefits that Google offers if you die as an employee

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Now we all aspire to work at Google because of its best employee benefits in the world – free haircuts, gourmet food, on-site doctors to name a few. There is still more to it even after your death – should a working Google employee pass away; their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a cheque of 50% of the employee’s salary every year for the next decade.  The best part – there is no tenure requirement. The underlying agenda here is to encourage a Google employee to be a part of the company for life.

Google HQ rents about 200 goats to mow their lawn

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At the Mountain View headquarters, Google has some fields it needs to mow occasionally. To lower the carbon emissions, an environment-friendly approach has been taken by Google: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, they’ve rented some goats from California Grazing for the same. The company said that it costs them about the same as mowing traditionally; goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers!

Google is your personal wedding planner

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Your wedding is one of the most important events of your life, and you want it to be perfect. It is also probably the most complex event that you will ever plan. To simplify your wedding planning, Google wedding planner sheets can be a lifesaver. Every detail can be conveniently recorded and tracked in one place using 20 templates that account for each aspect of your wedding plan. Since the information is stored in the cloud, it can easily be shared with others who are assisting with the party planning.

Explore the universe with the help of Google sky

 

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Google Sky is a feature for Google Earth and an online space viewer. The application allows users to view a collaboration of images from NASA satellites, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the Hubble Telescope.

Google’s founders’ private airplanes have runways in NASA where no other planes in the world are allowed to land

 

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For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their private planes, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft. The airfield is almost next door to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. Nasa signed a deal with Google that allows it to place scientific instruments and researchers on planes used by the Google founders.

Today, Google has turned into so much more than just a search engine. I only wonder what new things they would come up with tomorrow.