13 Facts You Didn't Know About Google

Google (GOOG) is one of the largest American multinational technology companies providing users with Internet-related services and products. Google Incorporated is the third largest company, in terms of market capitalization, in the United States; its market cap is $373.79 billion, only being edged out by Microsoft Corporation and Apple Incorporated. Although Google is one of the most well-known companies throughout the world, there are a plethora of facts that many do not know about Google.

1. Before Google became a powerhouse search engine, it was known as BackRub. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, met at Stanford University in 1995. The next year, Page and Brin collaborated on a new project, a powerful search engine called BackRub, which operated on Stanford University's servers.
2. Google.com registered as a domain on Sept. 15, 1997. The name is a play on "googol," which is a term for a very large number, a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the company's mission to organize and produce searches for all of the data on the Internet.
3. Google has so much affection for dogs that it flat-out says it's a dog company. Google's first company dog, Yoshka, came to work with Google's senior vice president of operations in 1999.
4. Google's New York division started in a Starbucks coffee shop on 86th Street with a sales team comprising one member in September 2000. That small team has grown to over 4,000 employees in the New York office in 2015, and it operates on 111 Eighth Avenue.
5. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were willing to sell their company for $1 million to Excite. However, Excite CEO George Bell rejected Google's $1 million price tag and missed his chance at investing in a potential billion-dollar company. In 2015, Google Incorporated is worth $370 billion. The tables turned on Excite, and the company was bought by Ask Jeeves in an acquisition 2004.
6. Google Incorporated offers some of the best employee benefits and even death benefits. If a Google employee dies, the deceased's spouse or partner receives half of the deceased employee's salary for 10 years. Children of the deceased employee also receive $1,000 per month until age 19, or 23 if the children are full-time students.
7. Google launched its Google Print division, now known as Google Books, which scans books into its application and website. Google intends to scan all existing books before 2020. To date, Google has scanned over 20 million books.
8. At first Google's Gmail application was thought of as a prank because it launched on April 1, 2004. Gmail's code name was Caribou, which was inspired by a cartoon. Google Gmail was only open to a select few at its inception; today it has over 425 million monthly active users.
9. Google's first message on Twitter was written in binary digits, just zeros and ones. The tweet was "I'm feeling lucky," which is a button on Google's homepage, in binary code.
10. On Aug. 16, 2013, Google Incorporated suffered an outage for five minutes. All of its services, including Google Search, YouTube and Google Drive, experienced this outage. During that brief time window, the world's Internet traffic dropped by a monstrous 40%.
11. In September 2013, Android surpassed 1 billion device activations throughout the world. In that same month, Google founded Calico, which is a company that focuses on health and well-being.
12. In 2014, Google acquired Deepmind Technologies, an artificial intelligence startup company, for over $500 million. Deepmind uses machine learning and systems neuroscience to build learning algorithms. With this technology and partnership, Google is developing a computer that is so artificially intelligent that it could program on its own.
13. In 2014, Google announced a new Google X project focusing on small electronics that could be placed in contact lenses to measure the glucose levels of diabetic users.