Google spends whopping $72 million every year on employee meals !!
72 million $ a year, that works out to approx. $7,530 per Googler (a term Google uses to identify employees). While the exact details vary depending on location, employees at Google’s California headquarters, aptly entitled the Googleplex, are welcome to at least two free meals a day from 11 different gourmet cafeterias. Another thing you didn’t know about Google is that in addition to the cafeterias, Google offers numerous snack bars that are chock-full of healthy morsels to munch on. And that’s certainly not all. Google even offers on-site car washes and oil changes. The list of perks for working at Google is never-ending, making it no surprise that it’s considered the No. 1 place to work.
It offers : on-site haircuts, full athletic facilities, massage therapists, language classes, drop-off dry cleaning, day cares, and on-site doctors, blah… blah…. Phew.. That’s a lot !!!
Google was originally called BackRub
Like many other booming internet companies, Google has an interesting upbringing, one that is marked by a lowly beginning. Google began as a research project in January 1996 by cofounder Larry Page, a 24-year-old Ph.D. student at Standford University. Larry was soon joined by 23-year-old Sergey Brin, another Ph.D. student, forming a duo that seemed destined for failure. According to Google’s own corporate information, Brin and Larry argued about every single topic they discussed. This incessant arguing, however, may have been what spurred the duo to rethink web-searching and develop a novel strategy that ranked websites according to the number of backlinks and not based on the number of times a specific search term appeared on a given web page, as was the norm.
Because of this unique strategy, another thing you didn’t know about Google is that Larry and Brin nicknamed the search engine BackRub.
Google loses $110 million every year through “I’m Feeling Lucky”
There’s not much to see on Google’s main search page & perhaps simplicity is one of the keys to Google’s success. When searching Google, you are given two options : “Google Search” or “I’m Feeling Lucky”. By clicking the former, you are given that familiar list of search results, by clicking the latter, you are automatically redirected to the first search result, bypassing the search engine’s results page. Besides the fun factor, the idea behind the “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature is to provide the user with instant connection to the precise page they are searching for, thus saving them time.
Sounds harmless enough, right ?
Not so fast. Because “I’m Feeling Lucky” bypasses all advertising, it is estimated that Google loses about $110 million per year in advertising-generated revenue.
Google’s sense of humor
Some might remember the “miserable failure” fiasco when one typed those words and clicked “I’m Feeling Lucky”, and they were instantly connected to a biography of President George W. Bush on the White House website. Now, before you jump to conclusions, this trick, which no longer works, was carried out by members of the online community through the art of “Google bombing”. Google bombing works because of Google’s backlink search strategy.
