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Source: BestComputerScienceDegrees.com

Google is arguably the king of the Internet. While their stats for some measures are not number #1, they take top place for many other measures to make up for it. Here are some stats and facts that may give you an idea of how big Google really is.

General Google Stats

The name Google is said to be a spelling mistake of the word googol. The latter was made up by a 9 year old in 1938, wondering what the number 10 to the power of 100 (equals 1 followed by 100 zeros) was called. He made up the word “googol,” as well as the word googolplex — which is 10 to the power of googol, or 1 followed a googol number of zeros. Googolplex is a number so large that astronomer Carl Sagan had said something to the effect that it could not be written down in the space of the known universe. It seems, with Google’s intent to “organize the world’s information,” it’s an apt name. The spelling “Googleplex” is the name of Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google was incorporated on Sep 4, 1998, and celebrated its 15th birthday in 2013. The web domain “google.com” was registered on Sep 15, 1997.

Google’s IPO (Initial Public Offering) price per share in Aug 2004 was $85.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin jointly own only 16% of the company’s shares. Forbes.com lists Brin as having a net worth of $24.4B as of Sep 2013. For Page, it’s $24.9B. When the share price reached $1000 on Oct 18th, 2013 – for the first time – Page and Brin’s joint net worth was estimated to have risen by an extra $5.9B since the previous day.

Reports vary, but between 900-1000 original Google employees became millionaires on paper (shares and stock options) when the company went public. As of late Jan 2008, it was estimated that about 1/3 of the first 500 original employees had left the company, as well as others that came later. Many of these “Xooglers” have founded new startups, become VCs, do philanthropic work, teach and more. Companies that some Xooglers have backed include Twitter and “green” sports car maker Tesla.

Estimated 2012 revenue for Google was $50.175M. Approximately 97% of that revenue was from ads.

Google V.P. Susan Wojcicki was #16 in Forbes magazine’s 2011 world’s most powerful women list. She was #25 in 2012 and #30 in 2013. (Her sister, Anne Wojcicki, married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2007, although they are estranged as of Aug 2013. Anne co-founded DNA analysis company 23andMe, Inc.)

The word “google” was added to the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as a verb in 2006. In this form, it means search the Web to find information on someone or something. “Just google me and you’ll find what I’ve been doing.” Google did not like that, but has since apparently given up telling people not to use their brand name as a verb. The words “googled” (past tense) and “googling” (present tense) are also commonly used — sometimes as a generic reference to using any search engine.

Google rented about 200 goats for about a week in 2009, to keep the grass at the Googleplex headquarters trimmed.

Google Services and Products

Here are some figures on Google’s various web services and products.

191M people visited various Google web sites just in Nov 2012 alone.

135M active users visited Google+ monthly, on average in 2012, compared to Facebook’s 1B actively monthly users (exceeded in Oct 2012).

Google+ users clicked the “+1” button on various websites 5 billion times per day, on average in 2012.

Google’s top searches for 2012 included Whitney Houston, Gangnam Style, iPad, Olympics.

Google Search enjoyed about 1.2 trillion search requests worldwide in 2012.

12.48 billion searches were performed by American users for Sep 2013, accounting for about 66.9% of the total U.S. search market.

Google’s carbon footprint for 2 searches is either 14g of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) if you believe a Harvard academic, or 0.4g if you believe Google. At 1.2 trillion searches, and using Google’s estimate of .2g CO2 per search, Google Search services emitted about 240M kilograms = 528M pounds, or about 19,555.5 clones of the largest African elephant recorded (27,000 pounds).

Google pays Mozilla (makers of the Firefox web browser) $300M per year to be Mozilla’s default search engine. Of course, that may change given the uptake in use of Google’s Chrome browser.

Worldwide internet traffic dropped by 40% when certain Core Google services went offline for only 5 minutes in 2013.

Google Search’s database has long since passed 100 million GB (1 gigabyte = 1,000 megabytes). If 100M GB of data were spread out over 100,000 of Oyen Digital’s U32 Shadow 1TB external hard drives (each at 0.48 inches thick), and these were stacked, the structure would be 4,000 feet tall. The Burj Khalifa building in Dubai is only 2,722 feet. If instead we used 100,000 of Western Digital’s 7mm-thick WD Blue 1 terabyte internal (laptop) drives and stacked them up, the structure would be 700 meters or about 2,296 feet. The next closest structure still standing is the Tokyo Sky Tree at 2,073.5 feet. The One World Trade Center building is 1776 feet; the Empire State building is 1,454 feet (including pinnacle and antennas).

Google’s Street View maps, started in 2007, cover over 5M miles of unique roadway. Street View uses car, trikes, trolleys and snowmobiles.

Google Maps (satellite, aerial and street view) passed 20 petabytes (about 21M gigabytes) of storage.

Google YouTube’s version of PSY’s official “Gangnam Style” music video exceeded 1B views in 2012 — the first video to do so — in 5 months. At the time of this writing, views are at over 1.8B, with thumbs-up votes at nearly 7.97M and thumbs-down votes at over 932K. The video had earned PSY an estimated US$870K (unofficial) from YouTube alone by late Jan 2013 (and over $8M from all video sources).

2.7B views were attributed to all YouTube videos that had “Obama” or “Romney” tags, during the U.S. 2012 election period.

About 2.5M hours of “news” videos were uploaded to YouTube in 2012. If someone were to watch every single video non-stop 24×7, it would take them over 285 years.

4B hours of YouTube video were viewed monthly, on average, in 2012.

When Felix Baumgartner set several new skydiving records jumping from a helium balloon about 24 miles above Earth on Oct 14, 2012, the video livestream was watched by over 8M people concurrently — a record for YouTube.com.

465M smartphones running Google’s Android mobile operating system were sold in 2012 — 66% of the world mobile smartphone market.

References

Information for this article was collected from the following pages and web sites: