1 Google is a play on the word “googol.”
On Sept. 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, Page and Brin registered the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google, a twist on “googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros. The name hinted at the seemingly infinite amount of data the brainy pair code their fledgling search engine to mine, make sense of and deliver. Many wondered if Google is a misspelling of Googol.
2 A former caterer for The Grateful Dead was Google’s first chef.
In 1999, chef Charlie Ayers won a cook-off judged by Google’s employees, then only 40 in all, to clinch the position, which he held for seven years. Ayers initially cooked for the Grateful Dead in exchange for free admission to their legendary shows, but later took over catering for the jam band. At Google, he eventually served 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafés throughout its Mountain View, Calif., global headquarters.
3 Google New York began at a Starbucks on 86th Street.
In 2000, Google unofficially kicked off its New York arm at a Starbucks in New York City. It was helmed by a one-person sales “team.” Now, thousands of “NYooglers” clock-in at its swanky, 2.9 million-square-foot New York office, a former Port Authority building on 111 8th Ave.
4 Google negotiated its acquisition of YouTube’s at Denny’s over mozzarella sticks.
“We didn’t want to meet at offices,” YouTube co-founder Steven Chen said, “so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’” That place turned out to be a Denny’s in Palo Alto, Calif. Mozzarella sticks were nibbled, hands were shaken. The 2006 landmark acquisition was a Grand Slam for Chen and co-founders Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. Not bad for the time. Google doled out $1.65 billion for what would explode into the Internet’s most-watched -- and most uploaded-to -- video platform.
5 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.
6 It speaks many languages.
In 2000, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish were the first 10 language versions of the site to be available to the public.
7 Google gave Mountain View the gift of free Wi-Fi.
In 2006, the company decided to provide Mountain View, the California town where its main headquarters is located, with free city-wide Wi-Fi. While certainly generous, it likely just meant that even more people were free to jump on the web and use the search engine.
8 Sergey Brin and Larry (Lawrence) Page met by chance.
Page, 22 at the time, having recently earned a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan, considers attending Stanford University for his Ph.D. Brin, then 21, already a Ph.D. candidate at the prestigious institution, is assigned to show Page around campus. That was back in 1995 and, as fate would have it, quite the momentous meeting of the minds.
9 Google was originally named BackRub.
In 1996, Page and Brin collaborated on a pioneering “web crawler” concept curiously called BackRub. Some speculate that the early search engine’s nomenclature was a nod to retrieving backlinks. BackRub, which linked to Brin’s and Page’s '90s-tastic original homepages, lived on Stanford’s servers for more than a year, but eventually chewed up too much bandwidth.
10 Google is a play on the word “googol.”
On Sept. 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, Page and Brin registered the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google, a twist on “googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros. The name hinted at the seemingly infinite amount of data the brainy pair code their fledgling search engine to mine, make sense of and deliver. Many wondered if Google is a misspelling of Googol.
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