Some interesting facts about Google

Ran into this article this afternoon, about a lecture given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google). The author of the article[link] was invited to the lecture and as an ardent audience he summarized from the lecture a couple of interesting facts about google. Following quoted facts are the ones I find most interesting to me:

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
2. One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the "Did you mean..." feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.
3. Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
4. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
5. They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.
6. The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'
7. Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.