Artocle appeared on timesofindia.indiatimes.

Internet giant Google has come a long way since it was founded in a garage in 1998 in California. The company, started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with four computers and a $100,000 cheque from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, is today the world's top technology brand.

Over the past decade the company's growth has been staggering. Here are some lesser-known facts about the Web icon from this decade-long journey.

Ever wondered how many page views world's no. 1 internet search engine clocks in a day? The figure is a staggering 7.2 billion. The company's daily visitors number around 620 million.


Little doubt then that the company's global search marketshare is a whopping 85.78%, with monthly searches crossing 87.8 billion. The amount of data processed daily by Google is 20 PB (Petabytes).

Google debuted on the Nasdaq on August 19, 2004. Google's IPO was one of the Silicon Valley's most discussed, dissected and debated IPOs.

The company's IPO reportedly came after numerous twists and turns, including a Playboy magazine interview with the company’s founders that drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a last-minute drop in the IPO price.

Originally priced at $85 each, Google's shares soared past $600 in 2007. The stock stood at $535 on February 26, 2010. While the company's assets stood at $40.5 billion as on December 31, 2009.

Google earns 97% of its revenue from advertising. In 2009 the company's ad revenue climbed $22,888,804,000. In 2002 the advertising revenue was $410,915,000.

The company's 2009 profit stood at $6,520, 450,000. However, in 2000, the compay's profit was in red at $-14,690,000. US accounts for almost 47% of the revenue by geography. UK contributes 13% and another 40% from the rest of the world.

A Noogler is a "new Googler," or a new employee of Google. It is said that a former Google employee Doug Edwards coined the term.

According to a recent report, a rule of thumb for all new Google employees is that when you have been around longer than 1% of staff, you cease being a Noogler.

Google employees can spend almost 20% of their time working on ideas and projects that interest them. And interestingly 50% of Google products have till date originated from that 20% time.

Google’s popular products like Orkut, Google News and many features of Gmail have been developed by Google employees during this 20% time.

Even today Google's 45% products are in beta. In 2009 several of Google's popular services like Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Docs came out of their beta phase.

Almost 60,000 new Android phones are reportedly shipped every day. In November 2007, Google announced Android platform, an open source operating system for smartphones.

Currently there are mere 20,000 Android apps in comparison to over a million apps in Apple iTunes.

Blogger, a free blog publishing tool that Google acquired in Feb 2003, gets 2,70,000 words written per minute. The figure is huge to gauge the popularity of the service.

Blogger's gets over 66.7% of its traffic from outside US.

Google is the top scoring company on climate advocacy, and CEO Eric Schmidt can articulate one of the most advanced corporate visions for long-term development of the renewable energy economy needed to tackle climate change.

However, interestingly Google is also among the very few leading technology companies who have not disclosed their own greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

According to Greenhouse, Google has no emission reduction targets and did not release or disclose its own emission levels. This lack of transparency on its own emissions puts Google significantly out of step with most other technology companies.