Blog . Jiboneus

Here is an interesting blog post by Alan Williamson regarding Google their early days that you might have not heard of.

First of the prime reason for the Google home page is so bare is not as a testament to simplicity but due to the fact that during that time Google founders doesn’t know HTML. They just wanted a quick user interface. They got lucky?

On the early stages they did user testing on their homepage. Users would just sit there staring at the screen without any interaction. When ask ‘what’s up?’ They replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. Google fix this by putting a copyright message at the bottom.

Even the name ‘Google’ was a mistake, a typo. The founders were actually aiming for ‘Googol’ which is a word representing a number with 100 zeros, just like a ‘million’ is a word representing a number followed by six zeros and a ‘billion’ is a number that followed with 9 zeros. May be ‘a googol’ is how much the Google founders planing to make with the company and it seems that they are going on the right direction.

Read on the blog entry for more interesting facts about Google on a lecture given by Marissa Mayer, product manager for Google.

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