Things you didn't know about Google

The name Google is a spelling error. The founders of the site, Larry page and Sergey Brin, thought they were going for 'Googol.' Googol is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web. Initially, Larry and Sergey Brin called their search engine BackRub, named for its analysis of the of the web's "back links." The search for a new name began in 1997, with Larry and his officemates starting a hunt for a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology.

The reason the google page is so bare is because the founder didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just kept sitting staring at the screen, waiting for the rest to appear. To solve the particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as an end of page marker.

Google started as a research project by Larry page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 and 23 years respectively. Google's mission statement is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The company's first office was in a garage, in Menlo Park, California. Google's first employee was Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology. The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank that assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that is not why it is called PageRank. It is actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

Google receives about 20 million search queries each day from every part of the world, including Antarctica and Vatican. You can have the Google homepage set up in as many as 116 different languages -- including Urdu, Latin, Cambodia, Tonga, and Yoruba. In fact, Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

In the earliest stage of Google, there was no submit button, rather the Enter key needed to be pressed. Google has banned computer-generated search requests, which can sop up substantial system resources and help unscrupulous marketers manipulate its search rankings.

The Google's free web mail service Gmail was used internally for nearly two years prior to launch to the public. The researchers found out six types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these six. The free e-mail service recently changed its name for new UK users. Following a trademark dispute with a London-based Independent International Investment Research, the mail account has been renamed Google Mail.

It would take 5,707 years for a person to search Google's 3 billion pages. The Google software does it in 0.5 seconds. Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.

The logos that appear on the Google homepage during noteworthy days and dates and important events are called Google Doodle. The company has also created an online museum where it has all the logos it has put on various occasions so far. Dennis Hwang, a Korean computer artist in the United States, is the guy behind these witty Doodles. Hwang has been drawing the face of Google for over two years.

You have heard of Google Earth, but not many know there is a site called Google Moon, which maps the Lunar surface. Google Moon is an extension of Google Maps and Google Earth that, courtesy of NASA imagery, enables you to surf the Moon's surface and check out the exact spots that the Apollo astronauts made their landings.