I wrote to a newsgroup netfriend (end of August 2003):

you don’t have an egomaniacal search-habit where you Google (that’s now a verb eh?) your name through the Web etc. I get emails every day from people who do that, and they’re frankly a pain, when they ask me to edit fairly minor things… And that means more work for our web-manager.

To which he replied:

Google is indeed now a verb; the ultimate success for a company.

Xerox achived the same status for hard copy.

And another responded:

Indeed. Some interesting facts..

Although started only five years ago, Google employs some 1000 people in a sprawling complex known as ‘Googleplex’ in Mountain View, California, and grosses $US1 billion per annum. It handles 200 million search requests daily, in 88 different languages, and indexes 3.1 billion webpages, using 10,000 super computers! In Australia alone, it gets over 4 million hits per month. search results are based on page popularity, based on the number of linked pages, as opposed to the usual method of using keywords. It is named after the mathematical term ‘googol’, and it’s cofounders Larry Page and Sergy Brin are both graduates of Stanford University, and still in their early thirties.