Count the facts, keep score and rate yourself.
If you know...
0: "Google, you say?"
1-5: you've heard about Google
5-10: you're informed
10-15: you're a practicing SEO by day, running a money-making web empire by night
15-19: you can, and do, say "Googledance" with a straight face
20: ... get a life ...
The Facts
1. Adwords accounts for 99% Google's annual revenue.
2. Google's advertising revenue in 2008 was $21 billion
3. 1.35% of the US' Adwords advertisers make up 80% of Google US ad revenue
4. Adwords as we know it used to be called Adwords Select. The top banner position was sold old school style through a program call Adwords Premium.
5. The first Adwords Select ad was in 2000 for live mail-order lobsters.
6. Google's pricing mechanism where the winner pays the runner up's price was devised to prevent super-inflated bid prices but the second-price auctions resulted in higher prices for Google right away.
7. In 2009 Google began showing ads based on their previous online activities. User patterns are segmented in 20 categories and roughly 600 subcategories.
8. In 2008, 80% of 80,000 typo-squatting domains in the US alone were funded through Adsense.
9. Google's query forecasting models are founded in their efforts to understand and predict Adwords pricing and click patterns.
10. Although it doesn't like to talk about using user data, Google cross references everything. "We have temperature data, weather data, and queries data, so we can do correlation and statistical modeling."
11. In the last 10 years Google's latency has gone from 1000ms to 200ms.
12. In the last 10 years Google has made seven major rearchitecture changes.
13. Compared to 1999 Google's index is now 100x larger but they update it 10,000 times faster.
14. Google catalogued its trillionth web page in 2008.
15. To translate one sentence Google does a million lookups in a multi-terabyte data structure.
16. To punish itself for artificial link inflation (paid links) Google penalized itself in 2009 by lowering the PageRank of it's Japan domain from PR9 to PR5.
17. Since January 2009 Gmail regularly beats YouTube in market share by US visits and is the 2nd most popular Google property.
18. The 3 largest traffic drivers for Gmail are Google, Facebook -- and Yahoo! Mail...
19. To encourage developer teams to move to new servers Google uses auctions where teams bid how many extra computers dedicated to their service it would take for them to move; the lowest bidding team wins.
20. In 2007 Google announced it will award $20 million to the 1st private team which builds a robot -- and puts it on the moon.
Want to check for yourself? Sources: SEO Book, Wired & Wired, New York Times, Labnol, Matt Cutts, Hitwise, The Register, The Guardian
About the Author: Ruud Hein
