You probably use it every day, but how much do you actually know about it?

Google is so much more than just a search engine. One of the early versions of Google could process 30 to 50 pages per second. Now Google can process millions of pages per second.

From a humble idea to a revolutionary tool, Google has changed the internet as we know it today.

And now, we’re looking at some top facts about the mysterious company…

  • Google was originally named BackRub.
  • Creators Sergey Brin and Larry (Lawrence) Page met by chance. Brin was assigned to show Page around Stanford University when he was considering studying there for his PhD.
  • Larry Page’s web page at Stanford was the first link indexed by Google.
  • The company’s first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, Calif. Wojcicki, sister of 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, is Google employee number 16. She was Google’s first marketing manager and is now the CEO of YouTube.
  • One of the company’s earliest employees was a friendly Leonberger named Yoshka.
  • 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.
  • The company rolled out Google Image search in 2001 with a whopping 250 million images.
  • In 2006, the company decided to provide Mountain View, the California town where its main headquarters is located, with free city-wide Wi-Fi.
  • In 2000, Google unofficially kicked off its New York arm at a Starbucks in New York City.
  • Since 2010, Google has been acquiring an average of one company every week.
  • Google uses a web tool called foo.bar to recruit new employees based on what they search for online.
  • Google is a play on the word googol, a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros.
  • Many Google employees became instant millionaires when Google went public in 2014.
  • Google negotiated its acquisition of YouTube in 2006 at Denny’s over mozzarella sticks.
  • Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man stick figure.
  • Google owns common misspellings of its own name as well, such as www.gooogle.com, www.gogle.com, and www.googlr.com.
  • Swedish Chef is a language preference in Google search based on The Muppets.
  • Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day in 2004.
  • Google wanted to sell itself to online company Excite in 1999 for $1 million, but the Excite CEO rejected the offer.
  • Google employees ride colourful ‘gBikes’ around the Googleplex.
  • The first instance of Google being used as a verb – “to Google” something – on television occurred during an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2002.
  • MentalPlex, the mind reading ability to search, was the Google’s first hoax for April Fools’ Day. It invited users to stare at an animated image and asked them to project a mental picture of what they wish to search on Google.
  • PAC-MAN became Google’s first ever playable doodle on May 21, 2010, for the day being the 30th anniversary of the arcade game.
  • As part of their green initiative, Google regularly rents goats to mow the lawns of their mountain view HQ.
  • Google employees in the US get death benefits which guarantee that the surviving spouse will receive 50 per cent of their salary every year for the next decade.
  • Headquarters is full of odd decorations, such as a T-Rex named Stan, a space ship, pink flamingos, a Lego figure, adult-sized ball pits, Android statues, and phone boxes painted in Google colours.
  • No part of a Google office is allowed to be more than 150 feet away from some kind of food.
  • The first Google Computer was made from Lego.
  • The company’s unofficial motto is, ‘Don’t be evil.’
  • The company’s first tweet was “I’m feeling lucky” in binary code.
  • The Google Street View has about 28 million miles of photographed roads.
  • More than 1 billion search requests every day are handled by Google. This is done by using more than 1 million computers.
  • On August 16, 2013, Google went down for 5 minutes and in that time, the global Internet traffic dropped by 40 per cent.
  • Google was declared the best search engine in June 2000, in a search and portal site tracking research done by NPD, an independent research company.