What You Didn't Know About Google—Or Googol?
- letslearnsomething87
- Jul 5, 2021
- 3 min read
Considering that by the time you've gotten this far in this sentence, over 200,000 Google searches have occurred, it's pretty sad that we basically know jack-squat about Google itself. Anyone's search history could cause someone to want to die of embarrassment if brought up among the company of others.
Well, for anyone as clueless as I was, let's look at just a bit of what Google was, is, and will be.
A Short Timeline - The History
In the off chance that you'll be drunk in a small bar on trivia night, this section is for you. Two names you may recognize, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were the two guys who decided to skip the college partying and start working on their first searching algorithm website called "BackRub." Sadly, it didn't quite offer massages or anything of the sort, but instead was based off of the back-link statistics that a certain search would hold.
I suppose due to the massive complaints that "BackRub" was not, in fact, a website with nice massages (or more accurately, because of the need for a bigger bandwidth), the pair took inspiration off of a word that would receive much less problems—googol (which was then made 'Google'). Because the definition of the word is just ten raised to the hundredth power, the only people that would be disappointed would be some very enthusiastic mathematicians.
In 1998, thanks to the help of marketing and outside financing (most notably from a large check from co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems Inc,) Google began to rise quicker than ever.
A Peak Inside - How Much Goes Into Google
Now that you have all of the basic information on the origins of Google that you probably won't remember past tomorrow morning, it's time for the fun stuff! Like... algorithms! Woo!
In reality, Google search engines and algorithms work just how you would expect them to. There are three stages to a Google search, including what is referred to as "crawling," which just stores pages and URLs that are new, updated, or recently looked at, "indexing," which takes those websites and finds what each page is about, and then the "serving search," which specifically looks at the key words in the URL and looks at location, language, formatting, etc, and ranks the page based on these factors. Unlike ads that appear at the top of the page, you can't pay for your page to have a higher ranking.
Less on the "duh" side, there are three coding systems that operate to perform the three stages above—BigTable, the Google File System, and MapReduce. The Google File System is the physical holding system across numerous machines which stores the data in large chunks. BigTable (you just know that the founders ran out of ideas for names by now) is the overall database, and MapReduce takes specific keywords and sorts articles by the most relevant factors included in it (it's the cool one, despite the name).
"The crazy thing about MapReduce was that it was designed to solve just one problem (inverting links to build the index), but it turned out to be an incredibly expressive computational building block sufficient for almost every large scale data problem."
And then there's what happens to your stuff. You know. The stuff you'd just really hate your parents or partner to see.
Most people know that Google stores your information (surprise surprise) whether you delete it or not. And this is used to customize your own recommendations and ads to get you more interested in what you see.
Whether this is good or not, its design is to help you, the user. Okay, yeah, and the companies and their ads too. Oh well. C'est la vie.
The Fun Facts
If you aren't interested enough to read the whole three minutes of information above, this is for you. Perfect if you want to make it seem like you're being productive and learning stuff. (Or trivia night, again).
Gmail was launched on April Fool's Day
Google rents goats to "mow the lawn" at Google Headquarters
Google started off in a garage
There are over 28 million miles of photographed road on Google Maps
The Google Play Store has over 3 million apps
Google Wave, Google Notebook, and Google Catalog Search are among some of the failed Google apps that never really made the cut
Google makes an estimate of 50 million dollars a day
There are over 1,000 millionaires from working at Google
Employees at Google Headquarters have a variety of over 30 options, all for free
It's harder to work for Google than to get into Harvard University
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