It’s a perfect garage-to-global story. From what was at its birth a hodgepodge of scattered content, Google has brought information to the fingertips of the masses. Since it was incorporated 20 years back on September 4, 1998, Google has re-written the way we access information, communicate, work, learn, consume media and manoeuvre the endlessly vast Internet.
Google was basically an academic project of two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They built a ‘data centre’ in Larry’s dorm at Stanford, and created a service called ‘Backrub’ that would crawl the web and rank its pages. Its first storage was just a load of hard drives housed in a container built of Lego.
It grew, and soon the duo relocated to the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who would later become CEO of YouTube. They opted to rename the service as ‘Googol’, meaning the number consisting of a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Aptly, the term was picked to signify that the search engine will give users an infinite amount of information on the web. But a misspelling resulted in the company being incorporated as ‘Google,’ thanks to a $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. 
“I’ll Google It” soon became part of everyday vernacular. And ‘Google’ was added into the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006.
Under the leadership of India-born Sundar Pichai, Google accounts nearly 90 percent of all Internet search requests which include the ones made from YouTube. It faces tough competition in Russia with Yandex, and in China where Baidu has largest market share.
And now for some trivia.
Google also owns the domain names of common misspellings of its own website’s name, including gooogle.com, gogle.com, googlr.com and 466453.com
Google has a rather unusual way of recruiting new employees. It uses a web tool called foo.bar which tracks the terms that people use when they are searching online. 
Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California are big, and lots of it is green. Google has an environmentally ethical way around that. Google hires a load of goats to clear the fields around its campus. And they have the advantage of being ‘a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers’.
The first ever Google Doodle was a Burning Man stick figure that came out on August 30, 1998. Larry and Sergey were visiting Burning Man Festival in Nevada. The festival’s logo was added to the homepage to let users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.
Page and Brin are both now multimillionaires. And they can also boast of being the only people to have their own private runways at Nasa. 
Walk into any of more than 70 Google offices worldwide and you’re bound to find people debating ideas that might sound crazy. It might be hard to imagine where we’re headed next. We might not have all the answers yet. But at Google, they will never stop searching. Bizarre as it may sound, Google might be the only company with the explicit goal of reducing the amount of time people spend on its site.
Welcome to ‘Nutty’s Infotainment. YAYS!’
Your time starts now.


The official website of Alphabet, Google’s parent company is abc.xyz. Which group owns the website, alphabet.com?
BMW


Who are ‘nooglers’ at Google?
New employees 


Which city will host the 2019 World Championships in Athletics, a biennial athletics event organised by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF)?
Doha.


He once said, “I love hot summers, cold winters, heavy rains and snows. And I think my films show that. I love extremes because I find them more alive.” Name this person whose dictatorial directing style earned him the nickname Tenno, meaning Emperor?
Akira Kurosawa


On this day in 1543, she inherited the Scottish throne as a 6-day-old baby. She briefly became queen consort in France but was forced to abdicate by Scottish nobles in 1567. She sought the protection of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, who instead had her arrested and later executed in 1587. Name her.
Mary Stuart


On September 9, 1776, the Continental Congress formally renames it as “United States” of America. What as it called before?
United Colonies


What would be the shape of a cupola roof?
Dome shaped


Which is the world’s highest national capital city?
La Paz


The legend of Santa Claus can be traced back hundreds of years to a monk named St. Nicholas. It is believed that Nicholas was born sometime around 280 A.D. in Patara. In which country is this place? 
Turkey


 The logo of Baskin-Robbins depicts a large ‘BR’ that doubles as the number ‘31’. What does it represent?


(Answer next week. Answer to last week’s photoquiz: Hi Chi Minh)