10 Mind-Blowing Facts About Google

1. Google.com, home to arguably the world’s most important internet company, contains 23 markup errors in its code.

2. Google has photographed 5 million miles of road for its Street View maps.

3. Originally meant to be called “Googol,” investors spelled it “Google” on a check and it stuck.

4. Google’s search index is more 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.

5. The world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos each month, over twice as long as modern humans have existed.

6. Google uses reCAPTCHA to teach computers how to read text. With 200,000 million CAPTCHAs solved each day, Google’s computers learn how to identify words scanned from books even if they’re warped.

7. Its main page is so sparse because Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know HTML. For a long time you could only search by hitting the return key – it didn’t even have a submit button.

8. Google might be the only company with the explicit goal to REDUCE the amount of time people spend on its site.

9. On average, Google has acquired more than one company every week since 2010.

10. In 2011, 96% of Google’s $37.9 billion revenue came from advertising alone.

via businessinsider