In the A – Z of Marketing G is for… You Guessed it – Google!

Google is an American based corporation who specialize in internet based services, from search engines to cloud computing. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on 4 September 1998, its mission statement from the start was “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Chances are you have used Google on more than one occasion, whether it was to ‘Google’ your local competitors or use Google Adwords to find the best keywords for your new website. The number of ways in which you can use Google a huge.

Here are 8 things you might not have known about Google:

1. Google was originally called BackRub. The homepage read: “BackRub is a ‘web crawler’ which is designed to traverse the web.”

2. Google has acquired an average of one company every week since 2010.

3. The first Google doodle was a Burning Man symbol. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to the Burning Man festival in 1998 and added the doodle to let users know they were away from the office that weekend.

4. Google hired its first in-house chef, Charlie Ayers, in November 1999, when the company had just 40 employees.

5. Ayers went on to become the firm’s executive chef, overseeing a team of 150 employees across 10 cafes at its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

6. You can use Gmail in more than 50 languages. These include Welsh, Basque, Tagalog, Malayalam, Telugu and Cherokee.

7. Around 1,000 of Google’s employees became millionaires when the company went public in 2004.

8. The ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ search button, which bypasses the results page to take users directly to the first result of their search, has been estimated to cost Google around $100m in lost ad revenue every year.

What do you know about Google that the rest of us don’t know? Send me your useful fact ? the best one will win a prize!