Google Lesson

Google Lesson

We will start with 19 Facts about GOOGLE!!!

1st Fact!

Sergey Brin and Larry (Lawrence) Page met by chance. Page, 22 at the time, having recently earned a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan, considers attending Stanford University for his Ph.D. Brin, then 21, already a Ph.D. candidate at the prestigious institution, is assigned to show Page around campus. That was back in 1995 and, as fate would have it, quite the momentous meeting of the minds.

2nd Fact!

Google was originally named BackRub. In 1996, Page and Brin collaborated on a pioneering “web crawler” concept curiously called BackRub. Some speculate that the early search engine’s nomenclature was a nod to retrieving backlinks. BackRub, which linked to Brin’s and Page’s '90s-tastic original homepages, lived on Stanford’s servers for more than a year, but eventually chewed up too much bandwidth.

3rd Fact!

Google is a play on the word “googol.” On Sept. 15, 1997, over the BackRub title, Page and Brin registered the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google, a twist on “googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros. The name hinted at the seemingly infinite amount of data the brainy pair code their fledgling search engine to mine, make sense of, and deliver. Many wondered if Google is a misspelling of Googol.  

4th Fact!

Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man stick figure.The inaugural doodle was an out-of-the-office message that Page and Brin created in August of 1998 to let people know they’d shipped off to the Burning Man festival. The future billionaires positioned the iconic Man behind the second “o” in Google’s logo.

5th Fact!

Google’s first office was a rented garage. So stereotypical Silicon Valley startup, right? Starting in September 1998, the company’s first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, Calif. Wojcicki, sister of 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, is Google employee number 16. She was Google’s first marketing manager and is now the CEO of YouTube. As for the house that built Google, the tech titan bought it, because of course, it did. Then it filled the suburban ranch-style dwelling with candy, snacks, and lava lamps.

6th Fact!

A former caterer for The Grateful Dead was Google’s first chef. In 1999, chef Charlie Ayers won a cook-off judged by Google’s employees, then only 40 in all, to clinch the position, which he held for seven years. Ayers initially cooked for the Grateful Dead in exchange for free admission to their legendary shows, but later took over catering for the jam band. At Google, he eventually served 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafés throughout its Mountain View, Calif., global headquarters.

7th Fact!

Google New York began at a Starbucks on 86th Street. In 2000, Google unofficially kicked off its New York arm at a Starbucks in New York City. It was helmed by a one-person sales “team.” Now, thousands of “NYooglers” clock-in at its swanky, 2.9 million-square-foot New York office, a former Port Authority building on 111 8th Ave.

8th Fact!

Swedish Chef is a language preference in Google search. Gurndy morn-dee burn-dee, who knew? Yes, it’s true. In 2001, Google got in touch with its inner yodeling Muppet and opened the gates for search queries and results in Swedish Chef lingo (called Bork Bork Bork, to be technical). Other “joke” languages you can tickle Google’s algorithm with include: Elmer Fudd, Pirate, Klingon, Pig Latin, and, of course, Hacker (a.k.a. 1337sp34k).

9th Fact!

Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day, no joke. Toying with Silicon Valley’s longstanding tradition of pulling April Fool’s Day pranks, Google unveiled Gmail on April 1, 2004, in a wackily-worded announcement that was widely misconstrued as a hoax. It wasn’t Google Gulp. It was a brilliant double fake and the precursor to a Google staple that now serves millions of users across the world every day.  

10th Fact!

Googlers ride colorful “gBikes” around the Googleplex. Launched in 2007, Google’s Googleplex campus commuter bike program began as a modest fleet of bright blue Huffys. Then came the goofy “clown bikes.” Now Googlers ride more than 1,000 primary-colored, basket-equipped beach cruisers, dubbed “gBikes,” around the two-mile expanse that is Google Mountain View. Interestingly, none of the bikes have locks. Employees simply “borrow” the nearest set of wheels. When they’re done, they drop them off conveniently close to office entryways for other Googlers to use.

11th Fact!

Google negotiated its acquisition of YouTube’s at Denny’s over mozzarella sticks. “We didn’t want to meet at offices,” YouTube co-founder Steven Chen said, “so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’” That place turned out to be a Denny’s in Palo Alto, Calif. Mozzarella sticks were nibbled, hands were shaken. The 2006 landmark acquisition was a Grand Slam for Chen and co-founders Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. Not bad for the time. Google doled out $1.65 billion for what would explode into the Internet’s most-watched -- and most uploaded-to -- video platform.

12th Fact!

Its leaders are in it for the long haul. In 2008, Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google and currently the executive chairman of Alphabet, told Fortune before the company went public in 2004, that the trio of Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin agreed to work together for 20 years.

13th Fact!

The early days of Google were not super glamorous. Schmidt told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman during an interview for Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast that the former CEO's first office at the company was an 8-by-12-foot space that he shared with the company’s then VP of engineering, Amit Singhal.

14th Fact!

The company helped fight fictional vampires. The first instance of Google being used as a verb -- “to Google” something -- on television occurred during an Oct. 15, 2002, episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

15th Fact!

Google has had a pet-friendly office since the beginning. One of the company’s earliest employees was a friendly Leonberger named Yoshka, who came to work with his owner, Google’s senior vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle.

16th Fact!

It speaks many languages. In 2000, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish were the first 10 language versions of the site to be available to the public.

17th Fact!

Google image search launched in a big way. The company rolled out Google Image search in 2001 with a whopping 250 million images for users to peruse. Not bad for day one.

18th Fact!

When it went public, Google was valued as much as General Motors. The company sold 19,605,052 shares of stock for $85 per share. It was valued at $27 billion.

19th Fact!

Google gave Mountain View the gift of free Wi-Fi. In 2006, the company decided to provide Mountain View, the California town where its main headquarters is located, with free city-wide Wi-Fi. While certainly generous, it likely just meant that even more people were free to jump on the web and use the search engine.

NOW Let's do some questions!

Multiple Choice

What is the name of this cell?

• B10

• 5B

• B5

• you cannot know the name from this picture

Multiple Choice

What does this icon do?

• opens classroom
• opens app menu
• opens user settings
• none of the above

Multiple Choice

How can you quickly log-off the Chromebook?

• ctrl-shift-q-q
• ctrl-shift-esc
• ctrl-shift-e-x
• ctrl-shift-"button above the 4"

Multiple Choice

How do you take a screenshot on a Chromebook?

• ctrl-shift-esc
• ctrl-"button above the 6"
• ctrl-button above the 5"
• ctrl-shift-6

Multiple Choice

You have to have separate passwords for certain Google apps.

• true
• false

Multiple Choice

Google apps automatically save periodically.

• true
• false

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• drive
• slides
• sheets
• classroom

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• slides
• chrome
• drive
• classroom

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• docs
• classroom
• youtube
• mail

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• sheets
• youtube
• classroom
• mail

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• classroom
• docs
• slides
• mail

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• sheets

• slides

• docs

• classroom

Multiple Choice

What is this icon?

• sheets

• slides

• docs

• classroom

Multiple Choice

Google can translate into most languages.

• False
• True

Multiple Choice

How would I use Google to find how many centimeters are in 10 inches?

• Use the calculator to figure how many centimeters are in 1 inch and then multiply by 10
• Use the translation option to translate standard units (inches) to metric units (centimeters)
• Use the conversion option to convert 10 inches to centimeters
• Search for a website that will give me an inches to centimeters conversion chart.

Multiple Choice

What should my search be if I am trying to find the definition of the word computer?

• dictionary computer
• meaning computer
• computer word meaning
• define computer

Multiple Choice

A website that allows you to search the internet is a ________________ ________________.

• Search Engine
• Web Browser
• Internet Provider
• Site Finder

Multiple Choice

A type of program on a computer that lets you access websites is a _______ _____________.

• Search Engine
• Internet Provider
• Web Browser
• Site Finder

Multiple Choice

Which of these is NOT one of the three reasons that people like Google?

• Online Tools
• Simplicity of the Logo
• Diversity of the Search
• Relevance of the Search

Multiple Choice

What formula did the founders of Google create that produced more relevant search results?

• PageRank
• Google Search
• ContentFinder
• SiteRanker

Multiple Choice

Who founded Google?

• William Thompson & Mike Womack

• Larry Byrd & Walter Seargent

• Sergey Brin & Larry Page

• Paige Lawson & Brin Laray

Multiple Choice

Who founded Google?

• William Thompson & Mike Womack

• Larry Byrd & Walter Seargent

• Sergey Brin & Larry Page

• Paige Lawson & Brin Laray