Google was nicknamed BackRub

Like most booming internet companies, Google had an interesting upbringing, which was marked by a lowly beginning. It started out as a purely scientific research project by two young Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to an official documentation, Brin and Page argued on every single subject they discussed. These incessant arguments, however, may have been what actually spurred the duo to reconsider web-searching and create a novel strategy for websites ranking based on backlinks, and not determined by how many times a certain search term is shown on a given site, as was the norm.

Due to the unique approach, Page and Brin planned to name the new search engine, BackRub. Fortunately, in 1998, Brin and Page decided to drop the sexually suggestive name, and came up with a now famous global brand ‘Google’, a word originating from a typical misspelling of “googol,” a word which refers to 10100.

Google scans our e-mails

Nothing in this life is perfect – or without even the slightest controversy – and with Google, it isn’t an exception. Google scans our Gmail e-mails through a process known as content extraction. All outgoing and incoming e-mails are scanned for certain keywords which will allow more accurate advertising. The technique has brewed quite a hail of controversy.

Google Street is also accused as a breach of personal privacy. The service offers high-resolution street-view images from around the globe and has, on many occasions, caught poor individuals committing questionable acts. Similarly, Google Earth has continuously come under fire from a few governments about the security risks it poses.

Google spends $70 million annually on employee meals

Seventy million dollars each year – that works out to about $7,300 per employee. While the actual details vary depending on your location, employees at Google’s California HQ, aptly entitled as the Googleplex, may get two free meals each day from eleven different gourmet cafeterias. As if that weren’t enough, the office has a few snack bars that are cram full of healthy and tasty morsels to munch on.

But, what if their cars are in a bit of a rut? Easy; Google offers on-site oil changes and car washes. The list of perks for working with Google is never-ending, making it obvious why it’s considered the best place to work, offering: on-the-spot massage therapists, full athletic facilities, haircuts, language classes, day cares, drop-off dry cleaning,  and a clinic just to name a few.

Google loses more than $100 million each year through “I’m Feeling Lucky”

There is not much to see when you open Google’s main search page, and maybe simplicity is one of the factors to Google’s success. When using Google, you are given a couple of options: a normal Search or a supposedly handy “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. By clicking the former, you’re given that typical list of search results; but if you click the latter, however, you’re automatically redirected to the #1 web site on a specific search result, bypassing Google’s search engines results page.

Other than the fun factor, the driving idea behind this feature is to give the users instant access to the actual information they are looking for, and hopefully save them time that would usually be spent perusing endless pages of search results. Sounds handy and harmless enough, right? Not really. Because it bypasses all text advertising and it is believed that Google loses more than $100 million each year in advertising-generated revenues.


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