When Google was launched in 1998, the company’s goal was to create a search engine that would help people make sense of the information available on the Internet – and that’s still true today. Over the past 25 years, Google has become more than just a search engine: today it maps the world, puts artificial intelligence into everyday tools, helps people build skills for digital careers, and much more.
On the occasion of our 25th anniversary, experts from the company offer to look at Google through numbers (25 numbers to be exact) to remember where they came from and where they are going.
A unit with a hundred zeros – and a source of inspiration for the company’s name.
0
The 100-trillionth digit of pi, discovered by a Google researcher in 2022.
Read more: Thanks to advances in cloud computing, a Google researcher broke her own record in 2022 by reaching new digits of pi. To do this, Emma Haruka Iwao used a computer program running on Google Cloud to process this data as quickly as possible – and she found the 100-trillionth digit in 157 days, setting a new record. To put 100 trillion digits in perspective, just know that 100 trillion inches of pie crust can stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back about 3304 times.
70 billion
The average number of daily YouTube Shorts views as of this month.
250 000
That’s how many patients worldwide have been tested with the ARDA tool for diabetic retinopathy, a disease that is the leading cause of preventable blindness.
Read more: diabetes is becoming a growing problem worldwide, and because there is a shortage of eye care experts in some parts of the world, related complications such as diabetic retinopathy can go undiagnosed and untreated.
Together with Verily, Google decided to see if they could train an AI model to identify diabetic retinopathy. The result was ARDA, or Automatic Retinal Disease Assessment, which was found to work on par with ophthalmologists in screening for the disease.
70%
This is the number of generative AI “unicorns” that are customers of Google Cloud.
Read more: A “unicorn” in this sense is a startup worth more than $1 billion.
12 billion
The number of image searches using Google Lens every month.
5 000+
This is how many Google Doodles have been created.
More details: in addition to more than 5000 doodles created at Google, the team receives about 7000 submissions from Google employees and users (including Doodle for Google participants) every year. There is an archive where you can see all the doodles they have ever published and learn more about them and the artists who created them.
8.5 million
Simultaneous views of the Indian mission’s lunar landing broadcast on the Indian Space Research Organization’s main YouTube channel – the most popular live broadcast on YouTube.
To learn more: On August 23, 2023, the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 landed on the south pole of the Moon, making India the fourth country to land on the Moon and the first to land on its south pole. While on the Moon, Chandrayaan-3 will collect and analyze data on the lunar environment.
30
The maximum number of seconds you have to undo an email in Gmail.
Read more: Did you accidentally send an email with an obvious typo? Just click undo send! You can customize the undo send window by going to settings – the duration of the undo send offers 5, 10, 20, and 30 seconds.
500+
The number of points of interest available in Google Maps Immersive View 3D mode.
100 billion
The number of suspicious spam messages that Android protected users from last year using AI.
More info: When spam protection is enabled, Google Messages uses machine learning models that can detect known spam patterns – and does so without sending the content of your messages to Google’s servers, unless you report them as spam.
Even if you don’t have an internet connection, spam protection works. The more users report messages as spam, the smarter this AI tool gets – and the less spam you receive.
1,5x
This is how energy efficient Google’s data centers are compared to conventional data centers.
More specifically, data centers are spaces filled with supercomputers that power all of Google’s products – Maps, Search, Bard, you name it! Just like a laptop, data centers generate heat when they run and need to be cooled, so we’re working to find environmentally friendly ways to cool our data centers, as well as make them more efficient.
For example, water-cooled data centers have been shown to use about 10% less energy and emit about 10% less carbon than air-cooled data centers. In 2021, water cooling helped the company reduce its data center energy carbon footprint by 300,000 tons of carbon. Google’s data centers provide three times the computing power for the same amount of electricity as five years ago.
10 million+
The number of miles that the company has captured and mapped using Street View cars is enough to circle the world more than four times.
Read more: Tricycles, sheep, snowmobiles, and camels were also used for this purpose.
10 million
The number of cells that a Google spreadsheet can contain (in case you’re wondering, it’s 18,278 columns).
20+
This is how many coding languages Bard knows.
More: This list includes Python, JavaScript, C++, Java, R, SQL, C, Go, Swift, and Kotlin – but Bard is always learning new languages, so this number will grow!
133
The number of languages supported by Google Translate.
Read more: Advances in AI and machine learning have helped make this possible. Some languages are “under-resourced,” meaning it’s hard to find high-quality datasets to train our systems to offer accurate translations for those languages. In 2022, the company made a breakthrough: for the first time, it added 24 languages to Translate using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where a machine learning model learns to translate something without translation examples for a particular language.
And while AI played a significant role in this achievement, partnering with native speakers to create parameters and validate the data was also crucial-when they evaluated the results, they found that most of the translations were of high quality.
1.7 billion
The number of photos edited in Google Photos each month.
200
That’s how much time in years the autocomplete feature in Search saves every day.
More information: As you start typing in the Search bar, Autocomplete helps you by anticipating your queries right away. Google estimates that Autocomplete reduces the amount of time you spend typing in Search by about 25% – that’s about 200 years of typing time saved per day.
30x
That’s how much the Super Res Zoom feature in Pixel 7 Pro can zoom in on an image.
Read more: Wondering how all that zoom fits into a Pixel without a giant lens sticking out of it? Engineers and designers worked together to position the lenses and mirrors laterally on the smartphone, creating the distinctive Pixel feature known as the camera bar.
500 000
That’s how many people around the world have completed the Google Professional Certifications program.
Learn more: Google Professional Certifications are flexible online learning programs designed to train people in high-demand skills. There are programs for a variety of careers, including cybersecurity, IT support, and UX design. Two of our latest professional certificate programs are the Advanced Certificate in Business Intelligence and the Advanced Data Analytics.
10-15
The number of seconds you need to whistle or hum to use Hum to search to identify a song. (And yes, you don’t have to have perfect pitch to do this.)
1.2 million
Tons of carbon emissions estimated to have been reduced by eco-friendly route guidance on Google Maps as of the end of 2022. This is the equivalent of taking approximately 250,000 fuel-powered cars off the road for a year.
Read more: Eco-routing on Maps lets you choose a route that uses less fuel. Google Flights also helps you make environmentally conscious decisions before your flight. 99% of routes on Google Flights show a carbon footprint
7 million+
That’s how many people have signed up to receive irregular heart rate alerts on Fitbit since it launched in 2022.
Read more: This app assesses your heart rate and alerts you if there is anything that could indicate atrial fibrillation or AFib, a type of irregular heartbeat. To date, more than 126,000 “AFib signs” have been reported. Fitbit also has a Body Response feature available for the Sense 2 that can track your stress levels.
15
The number of Google products, each serving more than half a billion people and businesses. And six of those products serve more than 2 billion users each.
∞
The number of Chrome tabs you can open – yes, there’s no limit! (Depending on your device’s storage capacity, of course.) And when you reach 100 tabs on your mobile device, you’ll even find a little fun to make you smile.
