5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Google

1. There were three co-founders at the very beginning 

You may probably think of Brin and Page as the only two co-founders of the search giant. But in fact, the tech giant used to have another special founder, Scott Hassan. He was a very key programmer who produced almost code for the initial search engine. However, this man left Google before it was founded officially as a company. Both Page and Brin appreciated his efforts and left a huge stake proportion for him at Google.

2. It was initially named BackRub 

Previously, the famous search engine was named BackRub for the way it worked. Specifically, Google used algorithms to scan backlinks, thereby evaluating the relevance of the site. But in the end, Google was the name chosen instead of BackRub because it represents the word “googol”, which means 100 zeros followed by the number 1. However, "BackRub it" is still a common phrase. In simple terms, it means asking people to search for everything they need online.

3. Google's birthday was not the 27th as always 

Google had always celebrated its birthday on the 7th of September until 2005. In fact, Google used to select either September 8 or September 26 as its birthday. Even Google once explained the confusion about its birthday through a blog post. But for now, Google's official birthday is September 27.

4. Lego cabinets were once a place to store its data

You may not know this. Before becoming a data and information giant, Google used to store all data in ten 4GB hard drives, which is the largest capacity at that time. And those hard drives were stored in the Lego cabinet by the founders so they could be expanded without any difference. Nowadays, all the data is kept in different data centers globally, where millions of GBs of data are being hosted.

5. Stanford used to be the owner of PageRank patent 

Another fact that might surprise you. Google's first algorithm patent was not possessed by itself. Although the "PageRank" trademarks belonged to Google, the patent was actually owned by Stanford University. In 2005, the university obtained 1.8 million of stock in exchange for the patent use with a value of $ 336 million.