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1. Google employees in the US get death benefits which guarantee that the surviving spouse will receive 50% of their salary every year for the next decade.
2. https://vocal.media/journal/things-to-remember-while-interviewing-for-a-government-job
3. Google wanted to sell itself to online company Excite in 1999 for $1 million, but the Excite CEO rejected the offer, the price was knocked down to $750,000 but he still declined, saying the asking price was too high. One time Yahoo said no, but in 2002 offered to buy Google for $3 billion. Google said no, and it’s now valued at $800 billion. That’s got to sting.
4. Goats mow the company lawns. In 2009 the company hired out a heard of 200 goats from California Grazing to trim the lawns.
5. Google was originally named BackRub.
6. Google’s first office was a rented garage. Starting in September 1998, the company’s first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, Calif.
7. Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day, no joke. Toying with Silicon Valley’s longstanding tradition of pulling April Fool’s Day pranks, Google unveiled Gmail on April 1, 2004, in a wackily-worded announcement that was widely misconstrued as a hoax.
8. Googlers ride colorful “gBikes” around the Googleplex, none of the bikes have locks. Employees simply “borrow” the nearest set of wheels. When they’re done, they drop them off conveniently close to office entryways for other Googlers to use. https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/6717033?hl=en
9. Google negotiated its acquisition of YouTube’s at Denny’s over mozzarella sticks. “We didn’t want to meet at offices,” YouTube co-founder Steven Chen said, “so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’” That place turned out to be a Denny’s in Palo Alto, Calif. Mozzarella sticks were nibbled, hands were shaken.
10. When it went public, Google was valued as much as General Motors. The company sold 19,605,052 shares of stock for $85 per share. It was valued at $27 billion.
11. Google gave Mountain View the gift of free Wi-Fi. In 2006, the company decided to provide Mountain View, the California town where its main headquarters is located, with free city-wide Wi-Fi. While certainly generous, it likely just meant that even more people were free to jump on the web and use the search engine.

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/15753670?hl=en

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1465849&p=38755675#p38755675