Google celebrates its 15th birthday

As Mark Twain said Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

One of the world’s most popular search engines, Google, celebrated its birthday on Tuesday. One of the five most popular search sites, Google is a web search engine that lets people find other sites on the web based on key word searches. It also provides specialised searches through blogs, catalogues, videos, news items and much more, Originally known as BackRub, due to its analysis of back links, it made waves in the university research community but the splash wasn’t big enough to attract the attention of major portal vendors. The word Google; resembles the mathematical word googol, a number consisting of one numeral followed by a hundred zeroes. The name was chosen as a reference to the vast amount of information in the world.

The notable accomplishments of the company are that ever since 2010, Google has acquired one new company every week, and moreover the first doodle of Google was ‘the Burning Man’. This doodle was created to let the users know that the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were away from the office attending the festival in 1998. The company’s first in-house chef, Charlie Ayers was appointed in November 1999, when the company was being run by just 40 employees. Google’s mail service, Gmail can be used in over 50 languages, Welsh, Basque Tagalog, Malayalam, Telugu and Cherokee to name a few. It is interesting to note that a new Google employee is known as a Noogler while a former employee is referred to as a ‘Xoogler’.

Another thing Google is well known for is its corporate culture. Just the pictures of Googleplex, give a person the idea that the office looks more like an adult playground than a corporate house.

Google’s success can be attributed to this culture. Google has people whose sole job is to keep employees happy and maintain productivity. It may sound too controlling to some, but this is precisely how this world-changing organization operates. Human resources, or People Operations, is a science at Google. They’re always testing to find ways to optimise their people, both in terms of happiness and performance. In fact, almost everything Google does is based off data. So it should come as no surprise that Google uses all sorts of data to gauge employees and improve their productivity.

Happy birthday Google !