Over the years, I have come to embrace the mission of Google as I do have the urge to be evangelical about the company. The draw is the Google name itself, which has a kind of magic in the ephemeral world of startups. Its Mountain View HQ in California is a mecca for people who understand that the future is networked in their products and services. The company seeks to relentlessly expand it s empire through its innovation principles.

It currently finds itself in a deadly fight with other “free” services such as Twitter and facebook, with whom it is engaged in an arms race to monetise data they can harvest from consumers, and the more presonal  the information is, the more valuable.

20 Google Facts and Figures

1.  1996 The year Google started as  a research project at Stanford University
2.  £155 billion What the company is now worth
3. 1 billion+ The number of searches per day
4.  2003 The year Google acquired Blogger
5.  2003 The year Google launched Adsense
6.  2004 The year Google launched Gmail
7.  2007 Android platform announced
8.  2008 Google Chrome launched
9.  8 billion pages indexed in in 2004
10.  $1.65 billion Acquired YouTube in 2006
11.   1 Trillion pages indexed in in 2008
12.  1 million+ computer servers in data centers around the world
13.  7.2 billion daily page views
14.  87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites
15.  620 million Daily visitors to Google
16.  Over 19,000 employees
17.  97% is the percentage of revenue from advertising
18.  A ‘Noogler’ is a new person at Google
19.  45% of Google’s products are currently in Beta
20.  57% of the top 10,000 websites uses Google analytics
21.  You can GOOGLE these facts