Happy Birthday Google

This is Google's 17th birthday and in celebration here are 17 different things about Google

1. The "Google Guys" Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford university in 1995. Sergey was 21 and Larry was 22 when they met. Google was first a private company on September 4, 1998
2. Google went public in 2004
3. According to its website, Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and “make it universally accessible and useful.
4. Facebook users spend the most minutes on the Internet with over 250 billion minutes in May 2011. Microsoft and Google came in second and third with 204 billion and 200 billion minutes, respectively
5. In June 2000, Google became the world’s largest search engine.^b
6. In 2008, a Christian group sued Google for refusing to take its anti-abortion advertisements. Google claimed that it refused the advertisement because the company has a policy of declining sites that mix the issue of abortion with religious views. The suit was settled amicably out of court, and Google agreed to publish their ads.
7.  2007, Google and NORAD partnered to follow Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and used Google Earth to track Santa in 3D
8. In 1998, the Google homepage used a Yahoo-similar exclamation mark in its logo
9. Researchers have expressed concern that many Internet users assume the Google search engine represents reality, and that if some information is not on Google, it is either not important or it does not exist
10.  2010, Google admitted that for the previous three years, it mistakenly collected information people sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks
11. When Google introduced its “Did you mean . . .?” feature, site traffic doubled
12. The first-ever Google company snack was Swedish Fish in 1999
13. The most searched words on Google are always changing, but the following words receive the highest search requests: Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Google, and sex/video
14. Google Inc.’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, a fellow computer science graduate student at Stanford. He was hired September 1998. He currently serves as director of technology at Google
15. In 2007, Forbes magazine ranked Google as the best place in the U.S. to work
16. Google uses over 1 million computers for is operation and handles over 1 billion search requests—per day
17. According to Alexa (“The Web Information Company”), Google is the Internet’s most visited website globally