GOOGLE - THE DISCOVERY

1.Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998.

The unofficial company slogan is "Don't be evil"

2.Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies.

3.The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of June 30, 2008 the company has 19,604 full-time employees

4.The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships.

5.Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California

6.Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

7.Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997,and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

8.The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a US$100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems

9.The name "Google" originated from a common misspelling of the word "googol", which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

10.One of the earlier companies that Google bought was Pyra Labs. They were the creators of Blogger, a weblog publishing platform, first launched in 1999

11.In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc., which developed a product called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth.

12.99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112 million in licensing and other revenues.

13.As of August 2007, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%)

14.In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based e-mail service, known as Gmail

15.In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which not only allows users to search and view freely available videos but also offers users and media publishers the ability to publish their content, including television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music videos.

16.In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best places to work.

17.Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as

"you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun

18.As an interesting motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off), all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them.

19.Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors