You have to love a company whose mantra is “Don’t be evil”.

Google is my favourite search engine. Along with the fact that it directs a number of perverts to this site on a daily basis, there’s a whole lot of interesting stuff about Google that the average web surfer probably doesn’t know:

  • Google runs off over 10,000 (yes TEN THOUSAND) servers. My mind just boggles thinking about that.
  • There’s a guy at Google affectionately known as Matt, the Spam Cowboy and Porn Cookie Guy.
    Matt, the Spam Cowboy and Porn Cookie Guy

    Matt constantly searches through search results for spam sites (sites that contain popular keywords in their headers so they show up on popular searches, where the site does not have anything to do with those keywords and are basically spam sites) so that he can remove them from the index. These include porn sites. He’s trying to avoid say, a porn site showing up in a teletubbies search, for instance. He also regularly asks Google staff to surf for porn to help him in his quest (boys, that’s just one more reason you’d like to work for Google right?) and offers his wife’s home-baked cookies as a reward, hence, his title.

  • There’s a guy working at Google called Bwolen. His job is to oversee the “crawlers” (the software robots that roam the internet to index sites) and to publish or “push” the daily index. One day, he had a slightly long lunch break. When asked, he told his boss that he had gone out at lunchtime and gotten married. When asked why he came back that day, he told his boss that he needed to “push the index” for the day. Apparently, he had a nice honeymoon 3 years later.
  • Google is published in over 100 different languages, including Klingon and Bork, Bork, Bork (the Swedish chef from the Muppets).
  • If you click on the “more” link on your Google index page, you can find a whole lot of other services that Google provides for free. These include the Google Pack, a collection of free software provided by Google (including virus protection) and the best thing on the internet. EVER. - Google Earth. Google Earth is worth its own article. I’ll do that soon and include some links to places worth seeing! The Google pack is something that you more internet-savvy people might want to direct your “new to the Internet” friends for some useful pieces of software (oh, and you’ll impress the pants off them with Google Earth, of course!).

All of this information (and a WHOLE LOT more) can be found in a Google Factory Tour video. It runs for five, yes FIVE hours (so obviously, dialup internet users need not apply!) and really gives you an insight on how Google works and how its people work. Quite an eye-opener!

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