Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (the changing Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by millions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But did you know that the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message?

In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle (shown above), was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

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As proud hosts to Google back when it was still a research project, and known as “BackRub,” here Stanfordnow showcases the original Google storage from way back in 1996. It’s made up of a whopping 40 GB (less than a modern iPod) and it’s made from, as fans of the building bricks will be delighted to see, LEGO. It even hash funny mini-figures on the top.

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

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#. What is Street View Technology?
Street View is a subsidiary project of Google Maps, which lets you see the real road level images that can turn 360 degrees giving virtual sense of street viewing. This technology is incredibly useful for driving navigation and exploring places [example -Times Square US]. Find more from http://www.google.co.in/streetview.

Bored of talking to regular gtalk friends? Want to meet new people online? If you are looking for such place to chat with complete random people, strike interesting conversations without letting anyone know your personal details then these anonymous chat websites will help you do that. No one would ever know who you are and your identity will always remain hidden.

These websites automatically picks random users and let you have one-to-one chat directly. Your personal details including your name are not asked and hence not revealed to anyone (unless you want).

Omegle is the most popular among all sites to talk to strangers. You can have either text or video chats based on your interest. This is also available for iPhone in App Store.

iMeetzu is another popular site which connects you to first random person available on chat. It also offers wide variety of features like map search, user search and registration for keeping logs. It is also available for iphone.

ANiceChat claims to be first established “stranger chat” website. Unlike other sites, ANiceChat uses flash for its very simple to use chatroom.

Getting Random is the only site which requires registration though with your facebook account.

Iddin provides some extra features like to choose people from your home country, other countries or just anybody. This is the only site which is also lets you share photos with your chat partner.

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The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.

The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.

Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.

Google has the largest network of translators in the world

They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.

They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.

The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’

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