Most of us initially met Google as a search engine, but we all know it now as a tech powerhouse that has expanded into countless services and products, including online advertising technologies, cloud computing and hardware. 

Google, whose mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” began as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin – both PhD students at Stanford University at the time. 

Today, Google.com is the most visited website in the world, and is considered one of the “Big Four” technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

But on an even more literal level, today is Google’s birthday (well, there’s some controversy about that, but today’s the day Google recognizes). And as the company celebrates its 21st year of existence, it seems like a great time to dig deeper…

Seven Things You Didn’t Know About Google:

1. Third Founder?

Everyone knows Larry and Sergey, but the project initially involved an unofficial ‘third founder,’ Scott Hassan, who served as the original lead programmer and wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine. However, he left before Google was officially founded as a company. Hindsight is 20/20 after all…

2. What’s in a name?

The name “Google” originated from a misspelling of “googol,” which is the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Page and Brin noted, “We chose our system’s name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”

3. BackRubbers vs Googlers

Oh, what could have been…Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. (Can you imagine having Bmail instead of Gmail?)

4. Hello, Angels! I see you Jeff Bezos 👀

Before it was even incorporated, Google was funded in 1998 by a $100,000-investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Google also received money from three additional angel investors in 1998, including Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos!! (The other two were Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.)

5. Merriam and Oxford Welcome You

Google became so well known that in 2006, the verb “google” was officially added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.

6. Ties to Burning Man?!?

The original Google logo was designed by Sergey Brin; however, since 1998, Google has been designing Google Doodles — temporary alternate logos that are placed on the homepage to celebrate holidays, events, people, etc. The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998, and was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed!!

7. It’s a Big Spender!

In March 2018, Google’s parent company bought the Chelsea Market building (near its NYC outpost) for $2.4 billion. The sale is touted as one of the most expensive real-estate transactions for a single building in the history of New York.