Interesting Facts

27th September 1998 - Google officially came into the world. They formally incorporated the company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. But according to Google, they are 10 years old today, so who am I to argue. Official Google Blog

According to Fixr.com, the Google autocomplete function can tell you the top searches for the cost of something by geographic area. (They have created an eye-opening infographic that shows what the most pressing concerns of an area are.  Some of their results were amusing, some sad, others worrying. “Camel” was the top search for Saudi Arabia “Croissant” came top in France "Passport and patent" were neck and neck in North America “BMW” in Germany "Prostitute" in Ukraine, Hong Kong, Latvia and Brazil "Slave” in Mauritania "Kidney" in Iran I decided to do a couple of tests, so I started with a simple "cost of * in ..." search for Nottingham. The results were:- ... living / parking / taxi Then I did the "How much does a * cost in ...". The results were:- IVF / the tram / to hire a limo Good old Nottingham. Then I did a "How much does a * cost in ..." search for England:- The results were:- divo...

According to Facebook's own figures only 31% of its employees are female. (To be fair, Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo have all reported similarly low figures.)

Today - 30th May 2013 is Tax Freedom Day in the UK. The day when you've actually earned enough to pay tax, NI contributions etc, and are now working for yourself. (Unless you are Starbucks, Amazon, Apple or Google of course. In which case, every day is tax freedom day.)

Facebook, PayPal, and Google have reward programs for advising them of bugs in their systems. (The bug has to be a potential security vulnerability, but the rewards can be substantial. Facebook pays a minimum of $500 for qualifying bugs, while Google pays from $100 up to $20,000! PayPal is coy about what it pays. Microsoft, encourages people to report bugs, but it doesn't fork out any money at all. Instead they "acknowledge" the person who reports it. I guess that's how Bill got to be so rich.)

It's Mark Zuckerberg's birthday today, he was born on May 14, 1984, but that's not what's interesting. (He is now 29 years old, and that means that on average, he's managed to earn around £820,000 a day during his lifetime. Funnily though, there's no Google Doodle to mark this occasion. Well, never mind, happy birthday anyway Mr Zuckerberg.  I hope someone bakes you a cake.)

Apple  paid less than 2% tax on profit made outside the United States last year. (They paid $713m (£445m) in overseas corporation tax on foreign profits of $36.87bn (£23bn) in the year to the end of September. That translates as a tax rate of 1.9%, compared to a headline corporation tax rate of 35% in the US and 24% in the UK.   Executives from Google, Amazon and Starbucks will be hauled before the Commons public accounts committee in the UK on Monday 5th November 2012.  They will be asked to explain why they pay so little tax to the exchequer. Analysis by the Guardian found that Google, Amazon, Starbucks and Facebook have paid just £30m in tax over the past four years despite generating more than £3.1bn in sales.)

The world's largest public toilet is (or maybe the largest plot of land for a single toilet) is a 200-sq meter plot of land in Ichihara City, Japan. (It cost ¥10 million and was installed for tourists to the area, but the loo is in a transparent booth! It's boxed in glass, in the middle of a spacious garden of potted flowers and plants surrounded by a two-meter-high fence, with spy satellites and Google Earth, who on earth would use it?)

Purely MHO:- Politics was a big theme in 2012. The Sunday Telegraph claimed that the Tories were launching a hunt to replace recently-departed "blue skies" thinker Steve Hilton using the format of a new reality TV show. The Observer said David Cameron had asked the Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder to come to Downing Street to advise him on issues of class. (Hubby and I fell for this one.) The Independent on Sunday reported on police stations holding "hosepipe amnesties" for the public to hand in garden hoses ahead of a hosepipe ban in south-east England (the hosepipe ban was real, just the amnesty was a joke). The Sunday Times' Style magazine hoped to catch out readers with its double-page spread on "Lemac", a new Middle-Eastern beauty treatment where customers are injected with cells from the humps of camels. Readers of The Sun on Sunday reported that Arsenal football club was releasing its own fragrance, which took its aromas from the E...

Researchers at Harvard University and Google have found that the English language has expanded by 8,500 words a year in the new millennium and now stands at 1,022,000 words. ( But nearly half of the new words are not included in any dictionary and are dubbed lexical "dark matter". They are either slang or invented jargon.  Which is why we have the Urban Dictionary.)   Source

According to Google, YouTube now streams 4 billion online videos a day. (Most of the videos still do not make money, but about three billion videos a week are monetized. I account for a couple a day.)

According to Google, about 42m new Android devices were activated in December 2011. (They calculate that  there are now around 280m active "Google Android" devices.  I own 2 of them, but unfortunately none of the newly activated ones, Santa wasn't that generous.)

According to a study by DLA Piper , one third of employers have disciplined employees for something posted on a social media site. (In addition, 21% of employers had to give their employees a warning for posting something derogatory about a colleague or about the business itself on their Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus account. Of course if I posted something derogatory about myself, I would have to discipline myself. No gummy bears for a week maybe?) Source: Britopian

@Google’s first tweet on Twitter was: “I’m feeling lucky”. (But they didn't write it like that, instead they wrote, "I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010” which means the same in binary.)

According to Jakob Uszkoreit, a senior engineer at Google, over 100,000 American students take the National Latin Exam every year. (With the launch of an additional Latin function into Google translate, it seems we can now read those ancient texts and even listen to Latin pronunciation. So who says it's a dead language?)

According to online measurement body UKOM, Facebook attracted more visitors in the UK than Microsoft. (Yes Facebook had 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May 2011, beating the 26.2 million who visited Microsoft's MSN, Windows and Bing sites combined.  Google is still top of the pile with 33.9 million visitors, whilst Twitter's UK audience was just 6.1 million.  I dread to think how much heat their servers produce coping with all those visitors.)

Google started its life as a search engine called BackRub. (It indexed 75 million websites and 30 million HTML pages were downloaded by the crawler. Larry Page gave his email address and phone number on the FAQs page. I dare him to do that nowadays.)

According to pollsters the Superbrands Council, Google is the brand Brits like the best. (The popular search engine took the top spot, and Microsoft came in second. Third on the list was Mercedes-Benz, followed by the BBC at number four. The fifth favourite brand was British Airways. Foods and supermarkets were quite low down, Coca-Cola at No 14, and Cadbury at 19th. Of course they probably didn't ask the residents of Broughton in Buckinghamshire, who recently spotted Google's Street View car entering their village, when they saw the camera-equipped vehicle a small mob gathered, and they forced the vehicle into a u-turn before it left the village. Seemingly they were worried about being burgled if people online saw their affluence.)

Google has adapted its free email service so that users can adjust their email settings to activate a feature that makes you solve a few simple math problems after you click "send" to verify you're in the right state of mind. (It's to prevent anyone from letting loose after having had a few too many, just to make sure you really want to tell your boss what you think of him / her. Not recommended for anyone who is mathematically challenged though.)

Google has paid out 125 million dollars in a copyright dispute with publishers. (The end of this dispute could see millions of books available for purchase online, but the payout will be split three ways: 30 million to creating a Book Rights Registry, 45 million to paying authors and publishers whose books have already been scanned without permission and the remainder will reimburse legal fees. So, the winner is - drumroll.... Surprise surprise! The lawyers!)