Table of Contents
By happenstance, Larry (Lawrence) Page and Sergey Brin crossed paths.
Page, who was 22 at the time and had just graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in computer engineering, thinks about getting his Ph.D. at Stanford. Page is given a tour of the campus by Brin, who was already a Ph.D. candidate at the elite university at the age of 21. It was a historic meeting of the minds back in 1995, as fate would have it.
BackRub was the initial name of Google.
In 1996, Page and Brin worked together on the trailblazing idea of a “web crawler,” which they oddly called BackRub. Some people think that the name of the first search engine was a reference to getting backlinks. BackRub, which provided access to Brin and Page’s first homepages in the ’90s, remained on Stanford’s servers for more than a year before it ran out of bandwidth.
A stick figure from Burning Man appeared on Google’s first doodle.
Page and Brin developed the first doodle in August 1998 as an out-of-office announcement that they had left for the Burning Man event. The famous Man was placed behind the second “o” in Google’s logo by the future billionaires.
Google’s first office was a rented garage.
Such a Silicon Valley start-up cliché, don’t you think? Beginning in September 1998, the company operated out of Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki is the sixteenth employee of Google. She is the sister of Anne Wojcicki, the creator of 23andMe. She was the original Google marketing manager before becoming CEO of YouTube. Naturally, the internet juggernaut bought the house where Google was first established. Then it filled the suburban ranch-style home with candy, munchies, and lava lamps.
Google’s first cook was a former caterer for The Grateful Dead.
To secure the position, which he held for seven years, chef Charlie Ayers won a cook-off judged by Google’s employees, who numbered just 40 at the time. Ayers first provided food for the Grateful Dead in exchange for free entrance to their illustrious performances, but later took over the band’s catering. He finally served 4,000 lunches and dinners per day at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters in 10 cafés.
Google New York was founded in 86th Street Starbucks.
At a Starbucks in New York City, Google unofficially launched its New York branch in 2000. It was helmed by a one-person sales “team.” At its posh, 2.9 million square foot New York office, a former Port Authority facility on 111 8th Ave., thousands of “NYooglers” are now clocking in each day.
Google search offers the option to search in Swedish Chef.
Who knew? Gurndy morn-dee burn-dee That much is true. In 2001, Google channelled its inner yodelling Muppet and began accepting search terms and outcomes written in Swedish Chef (called Bork Bork Bork, to be technical). You can also use Elmer Fudd, Pirate, Klingon, Pig Latin, and, of course, Hacker to amuse Google’s algorithm (a.k.a. 1337sp34k).
Gmail officially debuted on April 1st.
Google debuted Gmail on April 1, 2004, in a bizarrely phrased announcement that was widely misinterpreted as a hoax, playing on Silicon Valley’s longtime practice of performing April Fool’s Day pranks. No, Google Gulp wasn’t it? It was a masterful double fake that served as the forerunner of a Google staple that today benefits millions of people daily all over the world.
Google employees cruise the Googleplex on bright “gbikes.”
The Googleplex campus commuter bike programme was first introduced in 2007 with a small fleet of brilliant blue Huffy bikes. Then the silly “clown bikes” appeared. Today, Google employees can ride more than 1,000 “gBikes,” beach cruisers with baskets in vibrant colors, around the two-mile Google Mountain View campus. Oddly, none of the motorcycles are locked. The closest set of wheels is simply “borrowed” by the staff. When finished, they neatly leave them by the entrances to the offices for use by other Google employees.
Google discussed the purchase of YouTube over mozzarella sticks at Denny’s.
Steven Chen, a co-founder of YouTube, recalled that the group asked themselves, “Where is a place that none of us would go?” because they didn’t want to meet in an office. It turned out the location was a Denny’s in Palo Alto, California. Hands were shaken while mozzarella sticks were devoured. For Chen and his fellow co-founders Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley, the historic acquisition in 2006 was a Grand Slam. For the moment, not awful. Google invested $1.65 billion in what would grow to be the most popular video-sharing website on the Internet.
Its leaders are in it for the long haul.
In 2008, Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google and currently the executive chairman of Alphabet, told Fortune before the company went public in 2004, that the trio of Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin agreed to work together for 20 years.
The early days of Google were not super glamorous.
Schmidt told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman during an interview for Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast that the former CEO’s first office at the company was an 8-by-12-foot space that he shared with the company’s then VP of engineering, Amit Singhal.
The business fought against fictitious vampires.
On television, the phrase “to Google” something was first used in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that aired on October 15, 2002.
Google has always welcomed pets into its offices.
A friendly Leonberger named Yoshka, who came to work with his owner, Google’s senior vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle, was one of the company’s first workers.
Leave a Reply