HITS 20th BIRTHDAY
As the world-beating search engine marks the end of its second decade, DOMINIC MIDGLEY unearths 20 fascinating facts about the $800billion company
On April 1, 2000, Google joined in the Silicon Valley tradition of dreaming up April Fool stunts by announcing the MentalPlex – its ability to read users’ minds as they visualised the search results they wanted. Later April Fools included the revelation that pigeon-power delivered its search results, the launch of the Googlunaplex – a research facility on the Moon – and a Gmail Paper service, which would print “a physical copy of any message with the click of a button” that would then
be sent on via snail mail. Klingon, the language of the Star Trek aliens of the same name, became one of Google’s 72 language choices in 2002. Other unusual options include Elmer Fudd – the arch enemy of Bugs Bunny who can’t pronounce his “l”s or “r”s – pirate and Esperanto.
The company went public in 2004 with its shares trading at an opening price of $85, a rate that valued the company at $27billion, almost as much as General Motors. About 900 of its employees became millionaires overnight.
Many Silicon Valley insiders reckoned Page and Brin had lost the plot when they paid $1.65billion for YouTube in 2006. But a year ago one top Google analyst estimated its value had shot up to $75billion, five times more than Twitter at the time.
The company regularly rents 200 goats for a week at a time from a company called California Grazing to keep down the grass and clear brush in the grounds of its Mountain View headquarters.
In 2013 Google launched Project Loon, so-called because it involved balLOONs and the whole idea was initially perceived as so barmy as to be “loony”. The plan is to provide internet connectivity to the billions of people on Earth who do not have access to the web by suspending solar-powered radio equipment from networks of helium-filled balloons floating at a height of 20km.
Topeka in Kansas changed its name to Google as part of an effort to persuade the search engine giant to test its new ultra-fast fibre-optic connection in the city.
By 2011 Google had invested $850million in clean energy, including $168million in a solar power plant in California’s Mojave Desert and $100million in the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon, one of the world’s largest.
Google has multiple private jets including a Boeing 767, a Boeing 757 and two Gulfstream Vs. In order to secure convenient landing rights for this fleet it periodically lends them to its neighbour Nasa in return for use of its air strip.