Nirmalya’s Blog

A couple of nights ago, Alan Williamson, (amongst other things, a Java guru) was invited to attend a lecture by Marissa Mayer (a Product Manager for Google). He later blogged about several interesting facts that came up during the presentation. Here are a few interesting ones:

..The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML..

Now, that is something very very hard to believe, considering that Google’s founders, Larry Page And Sergey Brin, were both PhD candidates in Stanford University’s Computer Science Department!

..Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public..

..The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’..

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros [1].

..Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects..

I remember reading that somewhere before [here].

..One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic..

Not surprising at all considering that their spell check feature is able to check 595 different misspellings for the search keywords “britney spears” [2].

..”I feel lucky” is nearly never used..

not quite true. Atleast not for the multitude of Google bombs [3]. Try going to Google and typing “Miserable failure” and then clicking on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. You’ll reach the Biography of President George W. Bush [4,5].

..Google has the largest network of translators in the world..

and growing.. (one can sign up to volunteer as a Google translator, here).. no wonder Google is available in 109 different languages as of now [6].

. .The complete list of interesting facts about Google (as compiled by Alan Williamson) can be found here.

Another interesting read is an interview with Marissa Mayer in October 2002 [Link]