The IPO which most of the Wall Street wanted to fail, Google, went public 17 years back on August 19. The Internet giant, which has become a necessity of people, was listed at a valuation of $23 billion in 2004. Its valuation has swelled 78 times since then to $1.8 trillion, a growth of 30% CAGR.
Here are some interesting facts you would like to know about your search engine:
- Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were willing to sell their search engine for under $1 million in 1999 to internet portal Excite, who rejected the offer.
- As per some estimates, Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day.
- The original name of Google was Backrub. The name was changed later.
- Google is a misspelling of the word 'Googel', the mathematical term for a one with hundred zeros. This name would reflect the company’s mission to make all information accessible to the world.
- The Google search technology algorithm is called PageRank. PageRank assigns a value of relevance to every website and determines how important a website is. According to Google, PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. Yes! that's what SEO is about.
If you wonder why we are telling you so much about Google, you must know how important Google is. On August 16, 2013, Google was not reachable for 5 minutes, in that time the global Internet usage was decreased by 40%.