1. Google’s name is misspelled
The name is a play on the word “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeroes),
because Brin and Page wanted to organize a “seemingly infinite amount of
information on the web.”
2. Brin and Page are college dropouts (kinda)
Both young men had completed their master’s degrees and were on their
way to becoming computer science “doctors” when the matter of a
soon-to-be billion-dollar company got in the way.
3. Google’s was once housed in a rented garage
Unlike Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder), and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (HP’s founders), neither Brin nor Page, nor their parents, owned the garage
that housed the intrepid entrepreneurs. It belonged to their friend
Susan Wojcicki (Google employee no. 18); and apparently, even though
they has already been a company for two years, they moved into her
garage and paid rent in part to help Wojcicki pay her mortgage. 
4. Like prisoners, every Google employee has a number
It started with Page and Brin (Google Employees nos. 1 and 2) and
extends to the 50 000th employee (Google has roughly 55 000 employees).
To some, referring to professionals by a number might seem rude, or
cult-like. But if you’re a hugely successful company, you can get away
with just about anything.
5. Is that Sergey Brin in a cow costume stroking his udder?
That actually happened, during a job interview, according to Doug Edwards, in his book, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.
6. Not every perk at the Googleplex is free.
The company is famous for treating its employees to the high life at
its “Googleplex” headquarters in Mountain View, California: Free lunch
(and breakfast, and dinner), free haircuts, free state-of-the-art gym,
and the greatest workplace invention ever, the nap pod (see below). But
some luxuries come at a cost, like full-body massages and dry cleaning.
And some are downright exorbitant: Google once infamously hiked its onsite day care costs from $33,000 per child per year to $57,000.
7. Google’s “do what you want” employee perk may be dead or dying
That claim is being made by some current and former employees
who bemoan the demise of the Innovation Time Off program. That program
lets employees tackle undirected pet projects for one day a week (or 20%
of their work hours).
Google denies this charge. And that’s good, because it would be sad
to lose a perk that resulted in Gmail, Google News, and AdSense (the
pay-per-click ad platform, which accounts for 25% of the company’s
revenue).
8. Google has lost top talent to its competitors
Several former executives have bolted Mountain View for competitors
like Facebook (Gideon Yu, Sheryl Sandberg), Yahoo (Marissa Mayer), and
even the U.S. government (Megan Smith, the nation’s Chief Technology Officer).
9. Technically, Google is more than 150 companies rolled into one
The company has acquired nearly 200 technology businesses since its inception, including YouTube, Waze (a GPS navigation app), and GrandCentral, the VoIP platform that now exists as Google Voice.
10. Google doesn’t make “droids”
This may come as a surprise to some iPhone users, who are accustomed
to Apple’s hands in every aspect of the products they sell. Google’s
primary smartphone product is not hardware, but software: the Android
mobile operating system. For a brief period, Google owned the smartphone
manufacturer Motorola Mobility, whose Android-powered phones (one of
them is actually called the Droid) make up less than 6% of the Android market. Google’s own Nexus smartphones and tablets–like the new Nexus 6–are actually manufactured by LG, HTC, or Motorola Mobility.
Source:lifehack.org
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