Google is one of the largest companies in the world as we know it. It's hard to find somebody who doesn't use it as their default search engine, and many people have it as their home page. It has become so popular that the phrase “to google” has become a commonly heard combination of words all over the planet, and the word “google” was even included in the Oxford Dictionary in 2006. Here are some more interesting facts and figures about google that will blow your mind.
Google has teams where 14% of the employees didn't go to college. As a company it often looks for different and unique qualities in people and doesn't always rely on test scores and educational backgrounds as proof that potential employees are capable of the job.
Google actually hired a camel when creating imagery for their street view application. This was so they could document the desert and include it as part of the programme. There is also a similar programme that they have that lets you explore around parts of the planet Mars, as well as a 360 degree view of the base camp at Mount Everest.
By bypassing all advertisements, the “I'm feeling lucky” button actually costs the company $100 million a year. This is a device that will take you directly to the first page listed on the search which essentially saves you a few seconds as the majority of users will click on the first link that comes up as part of their research anyway. This seems like a lot of money to lose, however the company makes in excess of $30 billion a year from advertising, which surpasses CBS, NBC ,ABC and FOX combined. This isn't so surprising when you find out that every minute, 4 million searches are hosted by the search engine.
Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day. That's the average figure of how many people use Google a day, which translates into at least 2 trillion searches per year, 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day. On average, between 16% and 20% of all queries made daily are completely unique and have never been asked before. Each search is tested against over two hundred factors to create the best result.
Google is often rated as the number one franchise to work for in America, due to staff care and benefits from unlimited gourmet food and surprisingly excellent post bereavement programmes to potential personal development. The campus has been described as a “big playground”. Their openings are some of the most sought out after in the entire tech industry.
On the 16th August 2013, the servers at Google went down for five minutes which decreased internet traffic globally by 40%. This alone shows us just how dependable we are as a generation on this single company's existence. Since 2010, it has been buying out on average 2 companies a month to add to it's ever expanding portfolio of businesses.
Google owns YouTube which has become the world's second largest search engine despite being a video broadcasting platform. It was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stocks.