Google in 1998 (notice the exclamation mark)

Sure, everybody knows that Google was created by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin who became gazillionaires. But did you know that Google's first storage device was cobbled together with LEGO? Or that Google's first investor wrote a $100,000 check even before the company officially existed? Or that it has its own "official" Google dog?

Neatorama presents the Top 10 Neat Facts About Google:

1. Before Google, There Was BackRub

In 1996, graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on a research project to understand the link structure of the World Wide Web. They're particularly interested in determining the importance of a given web page based on its backlinks or how many other web pages link to it (which later became the concept behind Google's "PageRank" algorithm).

The project was named BackRub (yes, a play on the word "backlink"). You can see an archived page of BackRub in the Wayback Machine:

8) Your logo is upside down: Why is the light source obviously below the image? It looks quite unnatural...

The logo is simply a scan of my hand, from a flatbed scanner converted to black and white. The "back" in the picture is the scanner cover, and the shadows are from the scanner light.

2. The Original Google Computer Storage

Photo: Stanford Infolab's Computer History Exhibits Photo

Larry and Sergey needed large amount of disk space to test their PageRank algo, but the largest hard disks available at the time were only 4 GB. So they assembled 10 of these drives together.

While he was an undergrad at Michigan University, Larry had built a programmable plotter out of LEGO, so it's only natural that he used the colorful bricks to create Google's first computer storage!

3. Google's First Investor

Sun Microsystem co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim knew a good thing when he saw it. After talking to Larry and Sergey about Google for 30 minutes, he whipped out his checkbook and wrote a check for $100,000, made out to "Google, Inc." Problem was, Google, Inc. hasn't existed yet!

Oh, by the way, the Sun in Sun Microsystem stands for "Stanford University Network."

4. Google Garage

Talk about getting lucky tenants. In 1998, Susan Wojcicki rented her garage to two Stanford students - you know who they are - for $1,700 a month to help out with the mortgage. That turned out to be a life-changing decision for Susan - it got her a key early job at Google which translated to a top executive position later on, introduced a future husband to her younger sister Anne, and created a mini cottage industry for the rest of her family. (Photo: Jack Gruber/USA Today)

In 2006, Google bought the house which had become a tourist attraction (the busloads of people who show up to take pictures were so annoying that Google decided not to publish the address - though ironically, you can still Google Map it.)

5. Google's First Dog

Despite the Internet's obsession with cats, dogs rule Google. In 1999, a Leonberger breed named Yoshka came to work with Google's first VP of Engineering Urs Hölzle and became the company's "first" dog. (Photo: Google Timeline)

If you must know, Leonbergers are big dogs with lionesque mane that look really majestic. They are, however, useless as guard dogs because they're much too kind and gentle.

6. Just How Many Servers Does Google Have?

A sign near the Googleville data center. Photo: ahockley [Flickr]

The real Googleville. Photo: Melanie Conner/NY Times

Good question. Nobody outside the company knows, and Google ain't talkin'. The company's famously secretive when it comes to its data centers (Heck, no one even knows for sure how many data centers the company has!)

For example, The Dalles or "Googleville" data center in a small Washington Oregon town, was cloaked in secrecy:

"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."

Recently, Google Fellow Jeff Dean gave a revealing talk on large-scale computing systems in which he discussed technical details of a new storage and computation system called Spanner, which is designed for up to 10 million servers. Skynet, anyone?

7. "Green" Search

All those hardware must use a lot of electricity (indeed, Googleville data center is calculated to require about 103 megawatts of electricity - enough to power 82,000 homes or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington), but just how much energy do you use when you perform a Google search?

Google calculated that it uses about 1 kJ (0.0003 kWh) of energy to answer the average search query. It's so efficient that your PC will likely use more energy in the time it takes to do a Google search.

Photo: Google Solar Panel Project

To offset its electricity consumption, Google even installed 1.6MW solar panels on the rooftops of the Googleplex. A total of 9,212 solar panels generate 4,475 kWh daily, the equivalent of about the amount of electricity used by 1,000 California homes.

8. Google Trike

[YouTube Clip]

I'm sure you're all familiar with Google Street View and the camera-topped Google Car, but what about all of the interesting places inaccessible to cars? Enter the Google Trike, which started as a project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team:

"I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world - ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts - aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to see what our users come up with."

Previously on Neatorama: Google Car Pulled Over by the Cops - Now in Google Street View!

9. I'm Feeling Lucky Costs Google $110 Million a Year

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google's homepage takes you straight to the first web page result. Because it bypasses Google's own search result page, where users are shown ads, the button actually costs Google around $110 million a year.

Why keep it? Google Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marisa Mayer said:

You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people.

10. Googlebot, Revealed At Last!

Image: Ben Rathbone

In 2005, Ben Rathbone (then at Google's Hardware Operations) gave us a glimpse of humanity's future. I, for one, welcome our new Googlebot overlord:

Then I pondered the question: what does Google do? The grossly simplified answer that I came up with is Google connects the world with the Internet.

It all snapped into place: the idea of a robot, connecting a world with the Internet, with wires, that connect to big cabinets of computers. It was not hard then to make the leap to representing the internet as a world, or globe, made up of pages.

Remember the wild hair of Andre Agassi in the 1990s? Yep, you guessed it: a wig!

"I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?"

But the wig began to disintegrate as he took a shower the night before the Paris final -- "probably I used the wrong hair rinse," Agassi writes.

He panicked and called his brother Philly into the room. Together, they managed to clamp the wig together using clips and pins.

Agassi, 39, writes: "Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig?

"During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off.

"With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi's hair has fallen from his head."

Link

While it's chic to complain about the evil of taxes and government, there's an implicit assumption that higher taxes translate to more government services (the age old argument between liberals and conservatives generally revolve around how much government services, and therefore government size, is optimal.)

But do higher taxes actually bring about superior public goods? William Voegeli, in this op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, doesn't think so. He compared California (a high-benefit (supposedly)/high-tax state) to the low-tax state of Texas:

One way to assess how Americans feel about the different tax and benefit packages the states offer is by examining internal U.S. migration patterns. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more people moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas had a net weekly population increase of 1,544 as a result of people moving in from other states. During these years, more generally, 16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.

These folks pulling up stakes and driving U-Haul trucks across state lines understand a reality the defenders of the high-benefit/high-tax model must confront: All things being equal, everyone would rather pay low taxes than high ones. The high-benefit/high-tax model can work only if things are demonstrably not equal -- if the public goods purchased by the high taxes far surpass the quality, quantity and impact of those available to people who live in states with low taxes.

Today's public benefits fail that test, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin of NewGeography.com and Chapman University told the Los Angeles Times in March: "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California. Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class."

As a long-time resident of California (whose paycheck got even smaller as the State forcibly imposed a higher withholding), I don't mind paying higher taxes if I got something out of it - so it's intriguing to find out that the reality may just be the opposite: Link

Watch Cecilia Siqueira and Fernando Lima of Duo Siquera Lima perform Tico Tico no Fuba (zequinha de Abreu) with a single guitar at the 2009 Brazilian Music Institute in Gainesville, Florida. Sorry for the title, I couldn't stop myself ;)

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Arbroath

Oh, art! My day would certainly be much more dreary without performance art like this: In 2005, Marlene Haring donned a Chewbacca-worthy suit of hair and went crawling around Vienna's "Second District" (the city's red light district), much to the delight of passer-bys:

The long-blond-haired creature sleeping on the pavement at the street-corner rendezvous outside the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts did not greet the more-or-less informed audience, but set off at surprising speed on all fours into the park. The assorted audience followed as the creature made its way through the greenery towards the Prater (Vienna’s permanent fun-fair), past Autodrome, Space Shot, Ghost Train and Casino Admiral, emerging on Austellungsstrasse (Exhibition Road) and crossing into the neighbourhood known as the Stuwerviertel, where Marlene Haring lives.

Then it started to get weird: http://www.vargas.org.uk/artists/marlene_haring/mh_hairy/haarig_1.html

Money is the Root of All Evil - $11.95

You've heard the common saying "Money is the root of all evil," and now it's been conclusively proven with mathematical precision. From the Neatorama Shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?money-root-all-evil-tshirt-pid608.html | More Geektastic Science T-Shirts

Photo: Stephen Alvarez / National Geographic

NatGeo photographer Stephen Alvarez took this amazing shot of the Stephens Gap Cave in Alabama. As you can see, you'd need to rapel down the sunlit entrance to the left, or simply walk down the dark entrace to the right.

Mark Jenkins of National Geographic went spelunking for this fascinating article:

I'm about to back out when my shovel breaks through. I feverishly round out the hole and cram my head through. There is a low, triangle-shaped crawlway ahead of me. Surging with adrenaline, I try dragging myself into this new passage, but my chest gets stuck.

From the beginning I have been hyperfocused on digging in order to stave off dark, horrifying feelings of claustrophobia. But now, stuck like a rat in the throat of a snake, a sickly anxiousness sweeps over me. I violently kick my legs, but to no avail: I'm swimming in dirt. I realize that by not using the drag tray to remove the dirt, I've buried myself.

I try to calm my racing thoughts, but my mind is preoccupied with the millions of tons of rock above me. I've been told that caves seldom collapse, and yet here I am, trapped at the bottom of a breakdown, in a cave that obviously did collapse. I try to slow my frantic breathing because I've also been told that hyperventilating expands one's lungs and only tightens the squeeze, which is exactly what's happening. Suddenly I'm thrashing shamelessly, kicking and clawing and writhing. I manage to knock off my headlamp, and everything goes black.

Link

This has got to be the worst disguise ever: Carroll, Iowa police apprehended two men who decided to color their faces with permanent marker in order to disguise themselves!

Police received a call Friday night that two men with hooded sweatshirts and painted faces had tried to break into a man's home in Carroll, Iowa.

When police stopped a vehicle matching the caller's description blocks away, they were stunned by the men's disguises.

There were no ski masks or stockings pulled over their heads; instead, Matthew Allan McNelly, 23, and Joey Lee Miller, 20, streaked their faces with permanent black marker.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: Duck Tape Robber

Not getting enough sleep? If you live in West Virginia, there's a good chance that you're part of the 20% of the population who suffer from insomnia:

West Virginians' lack of sleep was about double the national rate, perhaps a side effect of health problems such as obesity, experts said.

Nearly 1 in 5 West Virginians said they did not get a single good night's sleep in the previous month. The national average was about 1 in 10, according to a federal health survey conducted last year and released Thursday.

Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma also were notably above average in their reported lack of sleep. In contrast, North Dakota had fewer problems sleeping, with only 1 in 13 reporting that degree of sleeplessness.

Health officials do not know the exact reasons for the differences.

Link

Every geek knows that "A" is for Apple, but I bet not many know that Apple had a "third founder" who gave up his stake for $800 (it would've been worth at least $17 billion today). Or that Cisco was named for San Francisco. Or that Twitter used to be called twttr? Let's take a stroll through the A to Z of computing trivia, Neatorama style!

If you think that Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, think again: there was a "third founder" of Apple. In 1976, Ronald Wayne gave up his 10% stake of the fledgling company for $800 because he was worried that the company would fold and that he would be liable for debts incurred by the other partners (at the time Apple wasn't a corporation yet). Of course Apple became the big company, and Wayne's stake could've been worth as much as $17 billion today.

Originally, Research in Motion wanted its wireless messaging device to have the word "e-mail" in its name. When RIM hired Lexicon Branding to do a little research, they found out that people associate "e-mail" with work and therefore can raise blood pressure. Someone said that the buttons look like small berries, so they decided to name it BlackBerry.

Evolution of Cisco logo, by Design Maven via Speak Up

Cisco System was named after the city San Francisco (the founders of the company worked for Stanford University, which is just a couple of town over). Indeed, first Cisco System's logo was the Golden Gate Bridge. (See also: Evolution of Tech Logos)

Ben Curtis, in his very first Dell commercial

In 2003, after three years of playing the Dell Dude, actor Ben Curtis was arrested while attempting to buy a bag of marijuana. People immediately parodied his tag line "Dude, you're getting a Dell" to "Dude, you're getting a cell." Though charges were dropped, Dell canceled the Dell Dude commercials. Curtis was working as a waiter in 2007 but he's making a come back with a (supposedly) upcoming play "Dude! I'm Going to Hell"

In 1977, the US Postal Service recognized that email would pose a serious challenge to its monopoly on delivering mail. At first, it wanted to ban emails (like it did mails delivered by underground pneumatic tubes), but the FCC objected and the Postal Rate Commission refused. So it created an experimental email service called E-COM ("Electronic Computer-Originated Mail"). The idea was simple: You send the emails, which the post office would then print out and deliver as physical letters at the price of 26¢ each (it was said that it actually cost the USPS $5 to deliver the message). Oh, and the service was one-way. If something went wrong, you'd get an error message delivered two days later ... in form of a letter! Needless to say, E-COM failed.

John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN programming language, said this about his invention: "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

When Paul Buchheit started the Gmail project at Google, he named it "Project Caribou" after a Dilbert cartoon strip.

HP could've easily have been PH. In 1939, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formed HP in a Palo Alto garage, they flipped a coin to decide the name of the company. Packard actually won the toss, but decided to name it Hewlett-Packard instead of Packard-Hewlett.

In 1999, Al Gore was asked by Wolf Blitzer what distinguished him from other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he famously said: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Gore was immediately ridiculed for claiming to have invented the Internet. Not to be outdone, Dan Quayle said "If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check."

JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, who created the method of compression for photo images. Like all image processing algo, JPEG was tested on the standard test image of "Lenna", a cropped photo of a 1972 Playboy magazine centerfold Lena Soderberg.

Knuth reward check, photo via Upto11.net

Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth offers to pay a reward of $2.56 for the first finder of errors in his books. Why $2.56? Because 256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar, which is sort of a joke that only a programmer can appreciate. But that's okay since that's Knuth's target audience anyhow. Indeed, Knuth reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies," according to MIT's Technology Review. If the name Don Knuth sounds familiar, that's because we've featured his Potrzebie System of Weights and Measure before on Neatorama. (see also: Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements)

At first, Linus Torvalds wanted to name his new operating system Freax, a portmanteau of "freak," "free," and "x" (for Unix). A co-worker thought that it was a horrible name and renamed it Linux without telling him.

In 1996, Monty Widenius and David Axmark created MySQL, a relational database management system that would later become one of the most widely used software in the world, powering many of the web's largest sites (WordPress, Neatorama's blogging engine, uses it). What most people don't know is that the "My" in MySQL doesn't refer to "me" - it's actually the name of Monty's daughter My.

The term newbie or noob, originally thought to be from British public-school and military slang "new boy," was first spotted in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre as an insult to a clueless newcomer. (N is for Newbie Onesies/Kids T-Shirt at the Neatorama Shop)

In 1977, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates were working on a CIA-funded project codenamed Oracle (because the CIA believed that it would give them answers to all questions). The project failed, but Larry and friends took the idea and used it to create a company that would later become the Oracle Corporation.

The most common passwords in the world are:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. link182
10. (your first name)

And you thought you were clever to do a derivative of Blink-182 as your password!

The keyboard you're using now is most likely set in a QWERTY layout (named for the first 6 characters of the top row of letters). This layout was invented by Christopher Sholes in 1874 because people were typing too fast on typewriters back then, thus causing the machine to jam. Sholes did frequency analysis on letter-pairs and separated pairs of letters that tend to cause mechanical jams when typed in quick successions like TH. Sholes' new layout was designed to slow down typists (technically, he aimed to improve typing speed by reducing jams - and indeed, that's exactly what happened.)

ROT13: Jung qbrf Whyvhf Pnrfne unir nalguvat gb qb jvgu zbqrea qnl Vagrearg? Pnrfne vairagrq n fvzcyr rapelcgvba zrgubq gung orpnzr dhvgr cbchyne va Hfrarg arjftebhcf nf n zrna gb uvqr fcbvyref, chapuyvarf naq chmmyr fbyhgvbaf. Gur vqrn vf fvzcyr: ercynpr n cvrpr bs grkg jvgu yrggref 13 cynprf shegure nybat va gur nycunorg ("ebgngr ol 13 cynprf" be EBG13). Gur travhf bs gur zrgubq vf gung orpnhfr gurer ner 26 yrggref va gur Ratyvfu nycunorg, gur fnzr rapelcgvba zrgubq jvyy qrpelcg n ebgngrq grkg!

Before Digg, there was Slashdot. The technology-related news website was so huge that getting linked from it meant a massive increase of traffic that would cripple smaller web servers. Webmasters call this the Slashdot effect, which is the granddaddy of similar terms Digg effect, Farked, or Drudged.

The very first Twitter message was sent by its co-creator Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006: "just setting up my twttr." That's not a typo - twttr was the original codename for the project (inspired by Flickr). At least twttr was better than one of the first names they were considering for it: twitch.

I'm including USB (Universal Serial Bus) here so I can play this awesome "Intel Star" commercial starring Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB. Watch it and weep:

Before the World Wide Web, there was Gopher (note: it's gopher://, not http:// - you'd need Firefox to see it) and Veronica was its search engine. Why Veronica? It's because the first search engine of the Internet, a tool that indexes FTP archives, is called Archie. Officially, Veronica is an acronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives."

Call it user-generated content, Bubble 2.0, millionth-word in the English language or whatever you want, but know this: Web 2.0 is trademarked by CMP Media (who partnered with O'Reilly in producing the Web 2.0 conference) in 2004. In 2006, they sent a cease-and-desist nastygram to the Irish non-profit organization IT@Cork for using the word in the name of their conference and sparked a kerfuffle over the ownership of "Web 2.0"

What's the company that invented the personal computer, graphical user interface, the computer mouse, but didn't bother to market them because it couldn't see their commercial potentials? Yep, Xerox. In 1979, Steve Jobs of Apple visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and saw the Xerox Alto workstation. Several years later, Jobs brought the Apple Macintosh to market.

When YouTube was sold to Google for $1.7 billion, the spotlight was on Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. But did you know that there was a third YouTube founder? That's right: Jawed Karim left the company to become a graduate student at Stanford University. He did, however, fare better than Ronald Wayne - Jawed got about $64 million worth in stock. Jawed also uploaded the very first video on YouTube on April 23, 2005:

If you own a PC in the late 80s/early 90s, then you're savvy about the ZIP file format. Back then, disk space was at a premium (a regular 3-1/2" HD floppy disk can only hold 1.44 MB worth of data) so compression was a big thing. In 1986, Phil Katz created PKZIP (Yep, PK is his initials) and released it as a shareware. He chose the name "zip" to imply that his software was faster than other compression formats available at the time. Sadly, Phil, the alcoholic computer genius, died alone in a cheap hotel cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.

Geologists: Experts in the Art of Subduction - $11.95, modeled by Zac.

Ever been seduced by a geologist? No? Well, you can't blame them - though they're not well versed in seduction, they are experts in the art of subduction. Y'know, tectonic plate movements and such. And in case you're going to get it on with a geologist, remember that subduction zones can result in absolutely volcanic ... er, eruptions.

Design by Chris Murphy.

Available from the Neatorama Shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?geologists-experts-art-subduction-pid612.html - Don't forget to check out our wide selection of Science T-Shirts and Scientists Do It T-Shirts

Have you seen this old man? He's the "Geezer Bandit," a serial bank robber than has robbed three banks so far (once while carrying an oxygen tank!):

Authorities say he walked in to a Bank of America branch in Rancho Santa Fe Monday, handed the teller a demand note, and showed a black handgun. It happened at the beginning of the business day around 10 a.m. at 17008 Avenida De Acacias. FBI agent April Langwell said investigators believe he's hit up three other banks in the last two months. He's suspected of robbing the U.S. Bank branch inside the Von's grocery store in Santee on Aug, 28.

Two weeks later, on Sept. 12, he walked in the National Bank branch in La Jolla and got away with an undisclosed amount of cash. Surveillance video showed him carrying an oxygen tank with tubes running up to his nose.

Then two and a half weeks ago, on Oct. 9, he targeted another U.S. Bank inside a Von's grocery store in Carmel Valley.

Link

Silver Playing Cards - $9.95

Don't play poker with those b-o-r-i-n-g playing cards! Check out these: a deck of silver playing cards that will surely liven up your next poker night. It's a guaranteed winner!

Newly listed - From the Neatorama Shop: http://shop.neatorama.com/product-info.php?silver-playing-cards-pid620.html

Congratulations to Hanan Levin of grow-a-brain and Stella on the arrival of his new baby: Adora "Nyunyu" Levin, born October 18, 2009.

Hanan wrote me: People who knew me would never have thought that at 56 I will have my first child, but here she is, taking a piece of me to see the 22nd century...

Congrats again, Hanan! Link

Photo: Monica Szczupider / National Geographic

When Dorothy, a beloved female chimp died at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon, her burial was witnessed by the rest of the chimps residing there.

Monica Szczupider took this photo that showed a wall of grieving chimps paying their last respect:

Speaking about Dorothy, Miss Szczupider, 30, said the chimp was a "prominent figure" within a group of about 25 chimps.

"Chimps are not silent. They are gregarious, loud, vocal creatures, usually with relatively short attention spans", she said.

"But they could not take their eyes off Dorothy, and their silence, more than anything, spoke volumes."

Link | Larger pic at Nat Geo Visions of Earth 2009