On Google's 18th birthday, 11 things you didn't know about the tech giant

Although Google has been celebrating Sep 27 as its birthday, no one is sure about the exact date

Google is celebrating its 18th birthday today with an animated doodle on its homepage.

However, as the tech giant celebrates its coming-of-age some are questioning when its birthday actually is. Turns out, the informative company has celebrated its birthday in the past on various dates. Confused? Well, that’s just one of the strange, confusing facts about Google and below are 10 more which will leave you baffled:





1) Nobody knows when Google’s birthday is

Although the tech giant has been celebrating its birthday on September 27 since 2006, no one is sure about the exact date Google was created.

There are at least six other dates on which Google has celebrated its birthday. Most years have a Google Doodle up on September 27, except in 2005 when it was put up on September 26, 2004 when it was displayed on September 7 and 2003 when it was up on September 8.

Further, Google's corporate history shows it was registered on September 15, 1997 and filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998. However, the idea for the company was floated much before that in 1996 as a research project at Stanford University.

In 2013, Google admitted the confusion surround its birthday and it now seems that the company has decided to stick to September 27 as its birthday.

2) Google might even be 19 years old

Google might already be an adult as one of its potential birthdays was in 1995.

3) There’s a T-Rex on the Google Campus

There’s a huge T-Rex model on Google’s campus, which is meant to remind employees not to let the company go extinct.

4) There’s also a T-Rex game hidden in Google Chrome

The T-Rex connotation doesn’t end there. When Chrome doesn’t have an internet connection, it shows a warning sign along with a small dinosaur.

If a user presses the space bar when the T-Rex is on the screen, it starts a game where you run along as the dinosaur, jumping over any obstacles by pressing the space bar again. The game will last forever, because all obstacles are generated by the code.

5) Google buys more companies than you can imagine

According to some estimates, the tech giant buys at least one company per week; sometimes even more than one. Most of these companies are really small but some have the potential of going big. While many of them are merged into others, some continue to exist on their own within Google’s fold like Android.

6) The first ever Google storage was made of Lego

Google now has one of the world’s biggest data storage companies. But at its very beginning, when it was known just as Backrub, its first storage was just a load of hard drives housed in a container built of Lego.

7) Google takes care of families of its deceased employees

Google is one of the few companies that take cares of spouses and children of its employees who died while they were still working for the company.

Husbands and wives of deceased employees receive 50 per cent of their salary for the next decade, while their children receive a payout until they’re grown up, too.

8) One Google search takes more computing power than it took to send Apollo 11 to moon

When you search for anything on Google, it takes just less than a second to show you the result. However, what we don’t realise is that it takes far more computing and networking power to look through almost all of the known internet than the relatively minor amount of code and computing that it took to put humans on the moon.

9) Google went down for five minutes and took 40 per cent of web traffic with it

Google went down for a meagre five minutes on August 19, 2013, but the implications were far-reaching as it took much of the internet with it. While other companies have looked to challenge Google’s dominance in search, it still represents a huge part of the web.

10) Google hires goats

Lots of Google’s huge headquarters are green. Instead of relying gas-powered lawn mowing machines, the tech giant has found an eco-friendly way to mow its laws. It hires goats, loads of goats, to clear the fields around its campus.

11) There are lots of dogs at Google too

Google’s office is very dog friendly. The company believes that letting people bring in their pups makes employees a lot happier. Unfortunately, cats aren’t as encouraged – simply because they tend to be upset by the dogs. But they’re not banned.

This article originally appeared on The Independent.