Top 10 secrets revealed in the Google Story

Following my subjective post about the Google Story book, I thought I would give end it on a positive note by providing the top 10 facts that appear in the book but are unknown to many of us.

1- Google didn’t generate any revenue for the first 2 years it went into business.

2- The servers used at Google are built by Google engineers and make use of their own Operating System.

3- For each page indexed on the Internet, a copy of that page is stored in 3 different locations worldwide.

4- The Google Chair, Eric Schmidtz, wasn’t initially keen on working for Google as he didn’t really see the potential in it.

5- There were over 20 million searches a day and Google was still not making any revenue.

6- When the group went public at NYSE in 2004, there was a long hesitation over how much should the shares be sold at. They finally agreed on a price of $85 (they are now worth almost $600) .

7- Larry Page and Sergey Brin are big fans of the Burning Man Festival in the Desert of Arizona, that they attend each year at the end of the summer.

8- Google has been facing lawsuits in many different countries due to privacy and IP infringement, including Belgium (Google News Snippets), India and Israël (Google Maps).

9- Google has controversially recruited former employees of Microsoft, including the Kai-Fu Lee, managing director of Google China, who has faced lawsuits by Microsoft for violating terms of his employment contract.

10- Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell the Google algorithm to Yahoo in 1997, proposal Yahoo refused, making it the biggest mistake in its history. Today Google is showing interest in co-operating with Yahoo in an attempt to merge the companies in the future.

If you have any more you can think of, please do comment on this post:)