Google is celebrating its 19th birthday today. Naturally, the search engine giant is celebrating in the most Google-y way possible — by releasing a special Google Doodle.
Here are 19 random facts about Google on its 19th anniversary
In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded the search engine.
Leon Neal/Getty Images
This doodle is a bit different, though — it has a game built into it. Users can spin a wheel to open one of 19 surprises Google has launched over the years.
Cute. But 19 is pretty old in tech years, so we thought that to honor the occasion we’d collect 19 random, in-no-specific-order facts about the tech giant. Happy birthday, Google. And please pick up this article in search.
1. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. The company was incorporated on Sept. 4, 1998, but has celebrated it’s birthday on September 27 since 2006.
2. Speaking of Google’s Doodles, the first Doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as an out-of-office message in case of a server crash while the two founders attended the Burning Man Festival in 1998.
3. Google employs more than 72,000 people.
4. Google leads the world in digital and mobile ad revenue. Nearly $50 billion — 67 percent of Google’s net digital ad revenue — will come from mobile in 2017, up from $38 billion in 2016 according to the analyst estimates.
5. Google owns domains of common misspellings of its name, like Gooogle.com, Gogle.com, Googlr.com and more. Google also owns 466453.com, which are the corresponding numbers that spell out Google on a phone’s keypad.
6. In October 2016, statistics showed that Google owned 90.3 percent of the world market share of search engines; as of July 2017, Google owns 86.8 percent.
7. Google is still mostly white, Asian and male. As Recode reported, the percentage of Google employees who are white decreased from 59 percent to 56 percent this year. The percentage of Asian employees increased from 32 percent to 35 percent.
8. Google is named for the number “googol,” which is the numeral one followed by a hundred zeroes.
9. Earlier this year, it was announced that Google is funding a new software project that will automate writing local news.
10. Here’s what Google.com looked like on Dec. 2, 1998.
The Wayback Machine
11. At the Google I/O developer conference in May, Google announced that there are now more than two billion pages using its AMP format, improved caching to speed up mobile page performance, spanning 900,000 domains.
12. According to Google, there are hundreds of billions of web pages within the Google Search index, and it is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.
13. Google’s philosophy consists of “Ten things we know to be true.” The No. 1 item: Focus on the user and all else will follow.
14. Google started playing elaborate April Fools’ Day jokes on April 1, 2000. The first joke was the MentalPlex hoax, which invited users to let Google read their minds. An archived version of the page can be found here.
15. Google recently announced a new head of diversity, just as it was dealing with a controversial 3,000-word internal memo sent across the company by an employee.
16. Google was started in Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Wojcicki is now CEO of YouTube.
17. Google owns five of the Top 10 mobile apps in America: YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps, Gmail and Google Search.
18. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for a whopping $1.65 billion, its largest purchase ever at the time.
19. Google’s head of artificial intelligence doesn’t think you should worry about a coming robot apocalypse.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
