Surprising facts about Google
Slogan are like living organisms, they slow down, and tend to lose their effect over time. This is case for the "Do not be evil", that Google claims since its inception. The IRS feels cheated from billions that go into tax havens, users feel monitored like in the Romania of Ceaucescu, sites see their income disappear overnight by a simple algorithm change. Devil or not devil? A list of facts may enable a better understanding of the firm ...
- The firm is nicknamed Chocolate Factory or Mountain View Chocolate Factory by reference to a book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which described a company fairly similar in its operation to Google.
We could also name it Shizaru, the name of the fourth wise monkey, which means "do no evil". - Google holds 3000 domains some of which being rather strange: 1p0g00g1e.com, daVinciCodeGoogle.com, eDonkeyGoogle.com, essentialMommy.com, gaggolo.com, gigolas.com.
- In 1997 the two founders had tried unsuccessfully to sell their algorithm to Excite, Yahoo!, Lycos, Infoseek and others search engine for 1.6 million dollars. But with no success and they created their company that now worth more than $ 100 billion.
- Google had created a social network before Facebook (and Google Plus). Orkut was created by two of its employees and launched in January 2004. Facebook was launched in February 2004. Orkut never gained success outside Brazil and India.
- Then Buzz was created, which wanted to integrate social features to Gmail was a total failure. Why? The answer in a picture ...
- It takes 20 minutes to walk around the building housing Google at New York (image). It is 300,000 square meters, 100,000 more than the Empire State Building and was bought for 1.9 billion dollars. Located at 111 8th Avenue it is just over a fiber optic network.
- When Larry Page, one of confondateurs decided to take the direction of the company, he requested a meeting with Steve Jobs for advice. His first reaction according to Steve Jobs himself was to send him to hell. Then he relented. (This was after the release of Android).
- Employees are classified as social groups with different colored badges. White badge is a upper class and gives many privileges. Yellow badge is a proletarian who is affected to menial tasks. Such as driving Street View cars...
- To its engineers, Google given one paid day a week to work on personal projects. This gave birth to Orkut, Gmail, and many other services. But over time, this became more and more difficult to obtain and it is near moribund now.
- Autonomous Business Units is an idea to fight against the departure of the engineers who are tired of bureaucracy that has developed over time and prevents them to develop their projects. Departments to which the ABU status is given do not need the approval of management to launch a site, sign a contract. This helped to create many projects.
- Google can quarantine any of its divisions and prohibit all employees of the firm to speak to the members of this division when it is considered irrelevant. This is what happened to Zagat, acquired in 2011, as reported by an employee.
The Zagat contractors say it seems like Google's full-time employees have been instructed to stop talking to them.
- A Googleplex is a set of buildings where recreation centers occupy an important space beside desktops and where numerous services are available. These complexes have the largest solar panels in the United States.
- Google can determine the age, sex, cultural level, subjects of interest of anyone who connects to its services. The algorithm that achieves this and is implemented in its sites has been the subject of a patent application.
- Is Google trying to commit suicide? The Panda algorithm has eliminated many ecommerce sites to the profit of eBay, Amazon and other giants of the net. But we do not need to search to find something on these sites: we can go there directly and search on the internal engine. Google tries to compensate by promoting new sites, thus making some discovery. But this in turn promotes spam sites and cancels the effects of Panda.
- In January 2014, Google's revenues come from the following products: ads on its own sites (62%), Adsense (21%), Motorola (8%), other (9%).
- To obtain the domain name extension .app, the firm had to pay $ 25 million!
- When the company announces that it will install fiber in a city, traditional operators are eager to split by two the cost of the subscription and multiply the transfer speed up to 20 times!
