20 Things You Didn't Know About Google

18. The Homepage Loads Faster Than Any Site

It's true! That's why people often use the search engine as a way of testing the speed of their internet connection. Because if it's struggling with Google, it'll struggle with everything. All the more impressive when you consider that the sophisticated algorithm takes into account 200 factors to get the best results, all in the fraction of a second.

17. People Freak Out When It's Down

Google rarely goes down, owing to the reams and reams of servers and hard drive space the company runs on. When it does, though, it can feel catastrophic. That isn't just hyperbole, however - an outage in 2013 reportedly saw a 40% drop in global web traffic.

That's not just people trying to access Google, that's people on the internet period. Nearly half the people using the internet stepped away from their computers as soon as Google stopped working.