17 things you didn't know about the internet's best friend

Its been 17 years of being man's true non-canine best friend. Google was born as a research project in Stanford University in March 1995 and launched in 1998 when Larry Page teamed up with his college friend with $1 million raised from friends, family, and other investors. Now, Google is worth over $360 billion.

Here are 17 amazing Google facts just for you:

1. Google is the internet's No. 1 everything:

According to internetlivestats.com, Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

2. It was born of 2 two fathers:

Google as a business is the birth child of two friends, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry Page is now CEO of Google's newly formed parent company, Alphabet, while Sergey Brin is currently directing Google X.

3. The former name sounded more like a spa, kind of:

According to Wikipedia, Larry Page nicknamed his research project "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

4. Because Gmail first launched on April 1st of 2004, many people thought it was an April Fools' Day prank.

But clearly it wasn't. When Gmail launched with 1GB of free storage, Hotmail was offering only 4MB at the time.

5. Its our favourite way of checking if we have connection:

Fun fact, you know your internet connection is poor when Google refuses to open.

6. Over six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube — that's almost an hour for every person on Earth:

Google purchased Youtube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. Now, it is the biggest video-streaming website in the world.

7. Google acquires a new company every 7 days since 2010:

Google averages a new company per week. Thats over 200 companies since 2010.

8. Google's gardeners have four legs each:

That's because their gardeners are goats instead of human beings. At their HQ, Google employees think its cute having goats trim their grass instead of lawn mowers.

9. In 1999, the founders of Google actually tried to sell it to Excite for just US$1 million. Excite turned them downThe Google founders were not really keen on making money, so they tried to sell Google for $1million to Excite. The CEO, George Bell tried to beat down the price to $750, 000. When they didn't agree, he kicked them out. Today, Google is worth over $300 billion. This is arguably the worst business decision in human history.

10. When a Google employee dies, their spouse or partner gets 50% of their paycheck for the next 10 years.

That's not all. Their children get a $1000 monthly allowance till they turn 19.

11. Google was an accident:

The name 'Google' was an accident. The founders wanted it named 'Googol'. It means ten raised to the power of a hundred. Apparently, that's how big their goals were.

12. Google's search index is more than 100 million gigabytes in size:

In simpler terms, it would take 100,000 1TB hard disks to contain all that data. How simple is that?

13. In 2014, about 89% of Google's US$66 billion in revenue came from advertising:

Because, Google is where every business wants to be seen.

14. Google has found GPA's and test scores to be "worthless as criteria for hiring"; they have teams where 14% of their employees haven't gone to college:

Perhaps, they believe GPAs aren't best at judging 'googleness'.

15. Google intends to scan all known existing129 million unique books before 2020:

Brace yourself for the biggest library in the Universe.

16. On August 16, 2013, Google went down for 5 minutes and in that time, the global Internet traffic dropped by 40%:

What is most amazing is that the apocalypse didn't happen in that time.

17. "Don't be evil":

Because, what else should Google be about besides good?