X-Nico

62 unusual facts about Google


Adiabatic quantum computation

Tests performed by researchers at USC, ETH Zurich, and Google show that as of now, there is no evidence of a quantum advantage.

In 2011, Lockheed-Martin purchased one for about US$10 million; in May 2013, Google purchased a D-Wave Two with 512 qubits.

AltaRock Energy

Founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneur Andrew Perlman and his business partners, AltaRock has received backing from investors such as Google.org, Advanced Technology Ventures

Asterix the Gaul

On the 29th of October, 2009, Google prominently featured an integration of Asterix and Obelix in its mast head, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first publication.

Barrow Street

Barrow Street, Dublin, home of Ireland's National Performing Arts School, Google Europe, and rock band U2's The Factory studio complex, among many other high-profile tenants

Beal's conjecture

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, reported having conducted a series of numerical searches for counterexamples to Beal's conjecture.

Black ribbon

Google displayed a black ribbon as a mark of respect and sympathy for victims of 9/11, the 7 July 2005 London bombings, and victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Boston Blazers

The team was owned by Tim Armstrong, the former President of Advertising and Commerce for Google.

Brun's theorem

The bid was posted by Google and was one of three Google bids based on mathematical constants.

Charles Marsh House

Although, as of November 2009, the house is present in both Google and Bing satellite views at the coordinates shown above, it has been demolished in favor of the construction shown in the image.

Chelsea Market

Also, more recently, Google has moved into some of the second and fourth floors.

Clean Energy Bank

These two bills received bipartisan support and have been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce, Google.org and the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA).

Colesville

Google states they hope to have the error corrected within a few days.

Communication and Leadership During Change

Google says, "Our commitment to innovation depends on everyone being comfortable sharing ideas and opinions".

Copiepresse

Copiepresse successfully sued Google in Belgian court, claiming that Google violated copyright law in posting links to and abstracts of articles in Belgian newspapers without permission.

DeepFlight Challenger

Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER) Marine, a San Francisco Bay Area based marine technology company established in 1992, that is developing a vehicle, Deepsearch (and Ocean Explorer HOV Unlimited), with some support from Google's Eric Schmidt with which a crew of two or three will take 90 minutes to reach the seabed, as the program Deep Search.

Dutch auction

The 1994 auction IPO of Japan Tobacco was substantially larger (with proceeds more than double those of Singapore Telecom and triple those of Google), but this auction was discriminatory or pay-what-you-bid, not uniform price or "Dutch".

Esperanto symbols

On December 15, 2009, the Esperanto flag flew on the Google home search page "Google" logo to mark L.L. Zamenhof's 150th birthday.

European Privacy Association

In 2013, CEO filed a complaint against EPA because the association had not listed any corporate sponsors in the EU Transparency Register, claiming that it had only ten natural persons as members; EPA then admitted that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are among its members.

EZTV

However, in October 2007 that domain began redirecting to a Google query for "eztv".

Femlin

(Like the drawings on which they were based, these statues were not anatomically detailed.) Originally priced at US$7.50 apiece in 1963, a complete set of the four statuettes was auctioned off by Leland's auction house in June 2004 for US$7,904.80, according to a Google cache of the auction.

G4G

"Good for Google", a term used by Google recruiters or coordinators to describe the rational of what they are looking for when hiring

GeoWeb Conference

The last 3 days of the conference included three Keynote Speakers which were: Dr. William B. Gail of Microsoft Virtual Earth; Michael T. Jones of Google; and Alex Miller of ESRI Canada Ltd.

Getaria, Gipuzkoa

In May 2012, a two-man team from Getaria won Google's "Model Your Town" competition by creating a complete 3D representation of their hometown.

Golis Telecom Somalia

XOGMAAL enables enquiring, emailing through the mobile, and searching the largest online encyclopedias and dictionaries as well as search engines such as Google.

Google Earth Flight Simulator

Google Earth flight simulator, a flight simulator integrated into Google Earth and created by Google

Google Hacks

Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching is a book of tips about Google, a popular Web search engine, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest.

Grand Canal Dock railway station

Like several stations in central Dublin, it is elevated above street level, with steps leading down to Barrow Street in South Lotts, near Google's European headquarters.

Graphic Artists Guild

In April 2010, the Graphic Artists Guild filed suit against Google to halt further development of the Google Books Library Project.

Hamina

One of Google's three European data centers is situated in Hamina.

Hartland Bridge

On July 4, 2012, in honour of its 111th anniversary, it was celebrated with a Google Doodle on Google's Canadian homepage.

Independent software vendor

The companies that make the platforms, such as Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Google, Oracle, Apple, SAP and salesforce.com encourage and lend support to ISVs, often with special "business partner" programs.

Istvan Bakx

Manager Hein Vanhaezebrouck was searching for a left-footed attacker and had typed in those words at search engine Google.

Kogel mogel

The company and search engine name Google, was given as a play on the spelling of the Googol number.

Le Soir

The paper gained some notoriety on the internet after it successfully sued the search-engine Google for copyright infringement.

Liberty Science Center

Google is LSC's creative partner in the creation of the 7,000-square-foot exhibition.

M. S. Sathyu

In 2013, Sathyu featured in the popular Google Reunion ad, where he played the role of Yusuf, an elderly Pakistani man who is reunited with his childhood pre-partition friend from India, Baldev (Vishwa Mohan Badola).

Mani the parakeet

At one point on July 5, 2010, a day before the Uruguay-Netherlands semi-final match, Mani topped Google's "Hot Searches" in Singapore.

Megaera

In modern French (mégère), Portuguese (megera), modern Greek (μεγαιρα), Italian (megera) and Russian (мегера), this name denotes a jealous or spiteful woman - Google translates all five as "shrew".

Mobile porn

Google built a new phone system called Android Market that supports any application within reasonable decency guidelines.

Nathan Wolfe

Wolfe has been awarded more than $40 million in funding from a diverse array of sources including The U.S. Department of Defense, Google.org and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Netcars

Netcars was the first automotive classified website to offer the used car market the Google inspired 'payment by results' billing model, where dealers can list their entire stock for free and only pay when they receive an enquiry through the Netcars website.

Network Startup Resource Center

NSRC receives major funding and in-kind donations from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Google and Google.org, Cisco, O'Reilly Media, Vint Cerf, the Richard M. Karp Foundation, IDRC, ISOC, and many other institutional and private donors.

OCLC

Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com have all collaborated with OCLC in order to make the WorldCat records searchable through those search engines.

Panguso

Compared to its private competitors, the Chinese Baidu and the US-based Google, which are used more frequently in China, the two shareholders of this joint venture are the state-owned Chinese news agency Xinhua and the in 2011 worldwide largest mobile telecommunication provider China Mobile.

Publishing

Google, Amazon.com and Sony have been leaders in working with publishers and libraries to digitize books.

PULSE Impact Investing Management Software

Acumen Fund recruited volunteer engineers from Google to build a prototype portfolio management system and from this work, a system called PDMS (Portfolio Data Management System) was launched.

Puzzlehunt

Google Games, a multi-part competition that usually includes logic puzzles, coding, trivia, and building challenges that utilize materials like Legos

Rent A Goat

In 2009 Google rented goats in Mountain View, California to clear overgrown lawns.

Roger Hargreaves

Google celebrated what would have been his 76th birthday, 9 May 2011, with a series of 16 Google Doodles on its global homepage.

San Angeles

In 2006, Marissa Mayer, Google's then 31-year-old product-launch czar, seized on the San Angeles concept to describe how Google might modify its home page:We're still not ready to make really fundamental changes and blast all of our products on our home page.

Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat

The phrase was chosen for being arbitrary and having not appeared in the Google index up to that point.

Southern Village, North Carolina

-- confirmed still in that location as of 04/10/10 -->a Google office, and housed the headquarters for the John Edwards for President Campaign of 2007.

Spamigation

Viacom's recent lawsuits against YouTube and Google, in which over 100,000 DMCA takedown notices were sent, used a system of spamigation that sent notices to videos if they contained selected phrases of material under Viacom copyright.

Utah State Route 224

In May 2010, a woman sued Google for $100,000 plus punitive damages after Google Maps told her to walk down the Deer Valley Drive portion of SR-224 and she was struck by a car.

Václav Čtvrtek

On April 4, 2011, Google celebrated his 100th birthday by replacing the original Google logo with a doodle celebrating his works for a day on Google Czech Republic.

Venrock

On July 19, 2013 it was announced that Daniel Loreto, engineering lead for Twitter and Google is joining Venrock as EIR.

Virtual pharmacy

The consumer basically finds their favorite virtual pharmacy through search engines like Google or Yahoo, explains their symptoms, look at the recommended drugs and fills out an online questionnaire that is forwarded to doctor for approval.

Web browser engine

KDE's open-source KHTML engine is used in KDE's Konqueror web browser and was the basis for WebKit, the rendering engine in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome web browsers, which is now the most widely used browser engine according to StatCounter.

Webuser

Topics covered include free software; PC security and maintenance; browser add-ons; the best Google tools; and the latest web trends and developments, such as Web 2.0 and social networking.

Weekly Innovation Challenge

Hill and Rogers stress the importance of innovation in both tech companies and universities: “To encourage more play on the job, colleges and universities could emulate nonacademic institutions like Google, Bell Labs, and IDEO by establishing playrooms and allocating time specifically for the purpose of fostering creativity”.

You Don't Love Me Yet

In his promotional appearance at Google, Lethem attributed this reaction to the novel's intentionally silly and light tone.


AdWords

In June 2012, Google rejected the Australian Sex Party's ads for AdWords and sponsored search results for the July 12 by-election for the state seat of Melbourne, saying the Party breached its rules which prevent solicitation of donations by a website that did not display tax exempt status.

AMD FireStream

One of the supporting firms was PeakStream (acquired by Google in June 2007), who was first to provide an open beta version of software to support CTM and AMD FireStream as well as x86 and Cell (Cell Broadband Engine) processors.

Azendoo

The application has partnered with Evernote, Box, Dropbox and Google so that users can centralize and share all of their informational sources confidentially.

Battle Bears Gold

Battle Bears Gold supports monetary transactions through the Google Play store, Windows 8 Store, and the Apple iTunes/App Store.

Book Rights Registry

The Book Rights Registry is an entity to be founded as part of a settlement of the lawsuit between the Authors Guild and Google over the Google Books scanning project.

CompanionLink

, Salesforce CRM, Zoho CRM, Lotus Notes, Google Contacts and Calendar, Google Apps, Outlook Business Contact Manager, Highrise, Groupwise, and Infusionsoft.

Craig Nevill-Manning

Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering center, located in midtown Manhattan, where he is an Engineering Director.

David Hassell

In 2013, 15Five received $1 million in seed funding from venture capital firm Richmond Global, 500 Startups, and investments from individuals, including Yammer founder David O. Sacks, Ustream founder John Ham, former editor of Mashable Ben Parr, Ben Ling of Google and Xobni founder Matt Brezina.

David Nimmer

Along the way, other litigated cases have ranged from the status of Winnie-the-Pooh to the collected choreography of Martha Graham to the Google Books settlement in New York City (still pending, for which he represents the interests of Amazon.com).

Delaney Gibson

In June 2011, Delaney was chosen as one of two musicians to take part in IdeaJam, a collaboration between Ashton Kutcher co-founded Katalyst, Intel, and Google/YouTube.

Edward D. Lazowska

Lazowska has mentored a number of students, including Hank Levy (University of Washington), Yi-Bing Lin (National Chiao Tung University), Ed Felten (Princeton University), and Christophe Bisciglia (successively Google, Cloudera, and WibiData).

Google OS

Goobuntu, a Linux distribution that Google uses internally

Google Sky

On January 20, 2012, Google announced a student development partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and released Sky Map under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

Gregorio Reyes

George Reyes – his brother is Chief Financial officer at Google

In Search of the Pope's Children

He then made the claim that 87% of Ireland's exports generated by multinational companies such as Microsoft, Apple Computer, Dell, Intel, and Google, implying that decisions made in New York boardrooms have a far greater effect on the Irish economy than decisions made in the Dáil.

Internet in South Korea

The ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, made a negative remark on the South Korean internet environment for falling "a little bit behind" due to governmental regulations during a conference with Choi See-Joong, chairman of Korea Communications Commission, and President Park Geun hye

Internet Society of China

The ISC issues what the Chinese government calls “self-disciplinary regulations,” including the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry, which has been signed by thousands of organizations operating websites in China, including Baidu, Soseen, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

Jeff Jarvis

Along with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani, Jarvis is a co-host on This Week in Google, a live-streamed podcast show on the TWiT Network which covers Google and cloud computing.

Max On Max

After spending 2 years working at Google, Max was inspired by On Intelligence and left in search for the source of higher level reasoning.

Merlien Institute Market Research Conferences

These conferences feature speakers from multinational companies such as Walmart, Hewlett-Packard, Citigroup, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Pepsico, Google, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Huawei, international think tanks and research agencies.

OpenFlow

In April 2012, Google's Urs Hölzle described how the company's internal network had been completely re-designed over the previous two years to run under OpenFlow with substantial efficiency improvement.

Political Google bombs in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election

Political blogger George Johnston of Old Fashioned Patriot claimed to be the coordinator of this particular Google bomb, which began a month after the Dick Gephardt campaign began using the catchphrase "miserable failure" to attack the administration.

Pyra

Pyra Labs, a Google company which founded the Blogger.com service

Ripe Digital Entertainment

The services were mainly distributed through cable video on demand services such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable and FiOS, along with syndication through the AOL, Google and Yahoo ad networks.

Roelof Botha

He previously sat on the board of directors of Meebo and YouTube before they were each acquired by Google.

Rosanne Siino

Since retiring, she has consulted for numerous high-tech and Internet companies, such as AOL, Google, Shutterfly, Qualcomm, and PlanetOut.

Serra Catholic High School

In addition, the school has implemented Google Apps for Education, enabling students, faculty, and staff to utilize Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Sites.

Slender Man

In 2011, Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of the sandbox indie game Minecraft, added a new hostile mob to the game, which he named the "Enderman" when multiple users on Reddit and Google+ commented on the similarity to the Slender Man.

Solve for X

European director Bruno Giussani stated regarding Google's endeavor: "The world needs more ideas, not fewer and more commitment to sharing them freely and openly so that collectively we can test-run them and turn them into reality ... Google being at the origin of this, obviously technology and engineering will play a big role in Solve For X".

Spertus

Ellen Spertus, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mills College and a research scientist at Google.

Tom Stocky

He’s credited with Google’s early forays into travel, leading up to the acquisition of ITA Software, which closed in April, 2011.

Unsquare Dance

On 8 May 2013, Google honoured the American designer and filmmaker Saul Bass on the occasion of his 93rd birthday with a Google Doodle and a video featuring this piece.

Ushahidi

On 23 December 2010, Ushahidi Co-founder and Executive Director Ory Okolloh announced that she was stepping down from her role to become Manager of Policy for Africa at Google.

Visegrád Group

The high technology and IT sectors are also growing with the help of investors like Google, Toshiba, Dell, GE, LG and Sharp.

YouTrack

It also has an integration with TeamCity, IntelliJ IDEA, TestLink, TestRail, and supports user authentication with Google Account, Yahoo!, OpenID and LDAP.