Much of people's online lives have been greatly influenced by a humungous multinational corporation headquartered in Mountain View, California called Google. Founded by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 as a privately held company, its massive growth has prompted an initial public offering in 2004, barely six years after its inception. With its informal corporate motto, "Don't Be Evil," which loosely means that "you can make money without doing evil," Google was able to grow from a mere search engine/tool to an advertising service (Google AdSense, Adwords), a full suite of communication tools (Google Voice, a VoIP phone service, and Gmail, an email service among others), an operating system (Google Android), a mapping service, and to so much more.
This is perhaps why outsiders and onlookers have admired the ideal corporate structure and management policies this organization offers its employees. "It's the stuff of legends," they'd say. And for all we know, you might be a fan, too. So to quench your thirst for Google-related trivia, here are three quirky things or facts you might want to know about this lovely company that made such a huge impact in our internet-centric lives.
Google has a dog policy
Google permits its employees to bring dogs to work. It even has a "company top dog" named Yoshka, who accompanies exec Urs Holzle inside the Googleplex. On its official code of conduct page, a three-sentence-long dog policy is outlined under the second clause ("Respect Each Other"). A full dog policy used to be posted on its investor relations site, but it can only be accessed via an archive today. Anyways, his is what the current policy reads:
"Google's affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out. For more on this, see our Dog Policy."
While here's an excerpt from the extended dog policy:
" The presence of dogs at Google has been a unique, and to some a treasured part of our workplace culture. Dogs can be a valued and important part of employee's lives and their ability to keep a dog in their workplace may enhance the quality of their work life."
Suffice to say, Google is a super canine-friendly company whose approach to dogs needs to be embraced by other companies. *wink*
Google's first ever tweet
On February 26, 2009, Google left its first tweet: "I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010." For those who don't understand binary, the message reveals a prominent phrase often seen in the internet giant's homepage. It translates to: "I'm feeling lucky." It's as geeky as Google could get.
The button's primary function is to automatically take a user to the top search result, like gambling or Russian roulette, but without any stakes. Google says that around one percent of all searches go through the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Nerds!!!
Google rents goats
Apart from the dog story, here's another thing about Google and animals. At their Mountain View, CA home base, they have rented goats from a company called California Grazing to help with the mowing of its grounds. "We have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard. This spring we decided to take a low-carbon approach: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we've rented some goats," Google posted in a May 2009 blog entry.
You may ask, "How do they go about it?" It's simple. A herder brings about 200 goats (out of the 800 owned by the company) and they spend around a week at the HQ to eat the grass and fertilize the soil. As the company puts it, "Goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers." Google is not a conventional company (and despite its over-commercialization and indecipherable corporate structure, the Google honchos from up above has remained true to their word that they do not intend to become one), so it's only fair game that they still have their own share of quirks every now and then.