Why Google Is Such A Cool Company! [Fascinating Facts]

With a mission statement that reads ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, it is not a matter of surprise that Google has turned into a behemoth of such huge proportions that it affects almost all businesses that are online and is constantly changing the way we live.

Let us look at some mind-boggling facts about this tech giant, headquartered in California.

The Re-Captcha Project

Re-Captcha asks users to enter words that are presented as distorted images. All of us have come across this message which is ubiquitous for the average Internet user.

The distorted words that you see cannot be read by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Websites which subscribe for this service present these images for users to decipher as CAPTCHA words in their validation process. These results are sent to the reCAPTCHA service which forwards the result to the projects.

The New York Times has digitized its entire works from 1851 till present because of this project. Click here for the archives

reCAPTCHA’s slogan is “Stop spam, read books”. So the next time you use the CAPTCHA button, be proud to be a part of the digitizing revolution.

Google acquires one company per week

Since 2010, Google has been acquiring more than one company per week. Read that again. One. Company. Per. Week. Mind boggling much! (Source: Wikipedia)

Google’s latest acquisition is Impermium, a security company that builds products for websites. It also has an Indian connection, two Indians, Vish Ramarao and Naveen Jamal were a huge part of this product.

Gmail in Cherokee

A chance meeting by Google engineer Craig Cornelius with a Cherokee national prompted Google to create a Gmail version of Cherokee

Cherokee has less than 20,000 speakers in the world. So why Google would use a bunch of their highly qualified engineers and do this? Because they are cool! Here is Google’s announcement on this.

I’m feeling lucky

110 million dollar loss just for a button!

Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button puts back the company by around 110$ million. That is because the user gets directed to the top search without showing the ads. They have no plans to take down the button.

“It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here,” Ex-Google exec Marissa Mayer says about the button.

Project Loon

Why would Google call a project of it’s own as Loon? Well, their dreams are certainly outlandish. Loon’s mission is to provide internet access to rural areas by providing internet network of balloons that are made to fly through the stratosphere. Google recently explained that the Loon balloon can stay aloft for three trips around the globe.

Check out the video on Project Loon, here.

Google X

Google X is a secret lab run by the company whose operations are overseen by Sergey Brin, co-founder. Here they work on projects pertaining to the future technologies such as a self driving car, contact lenses that monitor glucose in tears (helpful for diabetics), etc. Google Fiber and Google Glass are outcomes of this project.

Rumours about Space elevators that can travel to an unanchored station via a cable attached to the Earth are an inside joke.

We wonder what makes Google develop all these incredible mind-boggling technologies that other companies cannot even think of, save for SpaceX, the space transport company, headed by real life Iron man, Elon Musk. Can you think of other companies that are as innovative as Google? We would love to know.

While these are only some of the facts, these 6 projects by Google alone show you how cool this company is, and why Google is THE company where everyone wants to work!