Google has become an integral part of our lives and the word has even become a verb as we are often heard to say let’s “Google” that. I have even heard the web giant referred to in hushed tones during heated discussions and when a controversial fact or figure is being debated across a dinner table or at the local bar as to whether it is true or false and a person will pull out their iPhone and say “let’s check Lord Google”.

Google was founded in 1997 by two Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin whose initial company mission statement was

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

Which they seem to have made a good dent in achieving since they started the company.

Technology is enhancing us as human beings and the integrating of artificial intelligence is slowly being weaved and embedded into our activities and habits almost without us noticing. This reliance that is permeating our day to day existence even extends to a reported 60% plus of all buying decisions now starting with a Google search as we start our research online rather than walk the shop aisles and asking sales attendants questions.

It’s been barely 13 years since conception but the search company whose slogan is “Don’t be evil” (reputed to have been coined by the Google engineer Paul Buchheit in 2006 ) has now struck out into other technology areas beyond their core search business such as

The successful Android mobile operating system which is reporting 400,000 activations per day (April 2011)

Picasa photo organisation

Google ‘Earth’ the 3D view of the earth technology that was initially the start up Keyhole

Google Energy that is developing and investing in renewable energy projects such as wind farms in North Dakota

Google Driverless Car that uses Google Street View with artificial intelligence technology

The law of abundance is evident here if you want a glimpse of the facts and the staggering global statistics for Google in its search engine and associated online properties such as YouTube, Android and other associated subsidiaries and technologies

50 Amazing Google Facts and Figures

The original nickname was BackRub due to the backlink technology used to determine site importance but eventually changed the name to Google originating from the misspelling of the word “Googol (the mathematician’s term for the number one followed by one hundred zeros) to signify the large quantities of information for people that it would provide. Google began as a research project in 1996 Google.com domain went online in 1997 The first funding of $100,000 for Google was provided by Andy Bechtolsheim the co-founder of Sun Microsystems The CEO for ‘Excite’ George Bell rejected to buy Google when it was offered to him for $1 million when Brin and Page were finding the search engine taking up to much time from their research in 1999 The first round of venture capital of $25 million was provided in 1999 by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital 5 years before it floated Google incorporated in 1998 30 million pages indexed in 1998 1 billion pages indexed in 2000 Eric Schmidt named CEO in in 2001 Acquired Blogger in 2003 Adsense launched in 2003 Gmail launched in 2004 Google IPO in 2004 8 billion pages indexed in in 2004 Acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion 1 Trillion pages indexed in in 2008 Android announced in 2007 Chrome launched in 2008 1.8 million shares given to Stanford University for its PageRank Patent sold by Stanford in 2005 for $336 million It currently runs over 1 million computer servers in data centers around the world Google search handles over 1 billion searches per day 7.2 billion daily page views 87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites Google’s global search market share is 85% Daily visitors to Google is 620 million Google.com’s worldwide ranking is number 1 Revenue in 2000 was $19 million Profit in 2000 was a loss of $14 million In 2009 Google’s revenue was nearly $23 billion In 2009 Google’s profit was $6.5 billion 97% is the percentage of revenue from advertising Stock price at its IPO in 2004 was $85 Stock price in 2010 was $535 Over 19,000 employees 37% are research staff 37% are sales staff A ‘Noogler’ is a new person at Google 45% of Google’s products are currently in Beta YouTube market share is 39.4% 270,000 words a minute are written on Blogger 146 million Gmail users Google analytics is used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites 400,000 new Android devices are activated every day 100 million activated Android devices 200,000 Apps available for the Android 4.5 billion Apps have been installed from the Android Market Google’s Android mobile operating system is the world’s leading smart phone platform surpassing Nokia and Apple with a 33% share 33 million Android operating systems were shipped in the the fourth quarter of 2010 The Google Driverless car named the ‘Stanley’ won the DARPA Grand challenge and the $2 million in prize money from the US Department of Defense in 2005

More reading

Sources

Image by dmee