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97 free Google trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Google trivia questions with answers. Did you know Google processes over 8.5 billion searches daily? Test your knowledge of the world's most dominant search engine with our 97-question Google trivia quiz. From Sergey Brin and Larry Page's Stanford dorm room origins to today's AI innovations, you'll discover fascinating facts about the company that changed how we find information online.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Google's founders do to bank their first cheque?
Incorporate
Incorporate: Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim made the $100,000 cheque out to 'Google Inc.', a company that didn't exist yet, so the pair had to set it up before they could bank the money.
Q 02Who co-founded Google alongside Larry Page?
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin was the student showing Larry Page around campus when they met in 1995, and each later admitted finding the other obnoxious.
Q 03What was Google's search engine called when its founders first built it in 1996?
BackRub
BackRub was named for the backlinks it counted to judge how important a page was; Google's own history says it was soon renamed, adding a relieved '(phew)'.
Q 04Google takes its name from 'googol', the number written as a 1 followed by how many zeros?
100
100 zeros make a googol, a word said to have been invented by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew; in 2004 the mathematician's great-niece talked of legal action against Google over the name.
Q 05At which university did Google's founders meet in 1995 and build their first search engine?
Stanford
Stanford owned the patent on the ranking method the pair devised there; it licensed it to Google for 1.8 million shares, which it sold for $336 million.
Q 06Where was Google's first office when the company was founded?
A friend's garage in Menlo Park
A friend's garage in Menlo Park: its owner, Susan Wojcicki, rented it out to help cover her mortgage, then joined Google as employee number 16 and went on to run YouTube.
Q 07Who did Google's founders hire as chief executive in 2001, at their investors' urging?
Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt left the top job at Novell to run Google for a decade; when Larry Page took over again in 2011, Schmidt tweeted: 'Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!'
Q 08Gmail kept which label on its logo from 2004 to 2009?
Beta
Beta: Gmail did not drop the tag until July 2009, and in its early invitation-only days invites were so scarce that they sold on eBay for as much as $150.
Q 09How much free storage did Gmail famously offer each user when it launched in 2004?
1 GB
1 GB was hundreds of times the 2 to 4 MB that rival webmail services gave away, so generous that the April 1 announcement was widely taken for an April Fools' joke.
Q 10YouTube's three founders, whose site Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, had all worked at which company?
PayPal
PayPal: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were early employees who grew wealthy when eBay bought it, then sold their own start-up to Google just 21 months after founding it.
Q 11Which Google product began at Sydney's Where 2 Technologies?
Maps
Maps: brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and their team first built it as a program to download, then turned to one that ran in the web browser when they pitched their work to Google, which bought the start-up.
Q 12Which Google product was unveiled in 2008 with a 38-page comic book drawn by Scott McCloud?
Chrome
Chrome: the comic explained how the new browser worked, and copies posted early to Europe let a German blogger scan and publish it two days before the planned announcement.
Q 13Which Google software was first built as an operating system for digital cameras, before its start-up changed course in 2004?
Android
Q 21What happens when you search 'do a barrel roll' on Google?
The whole page spins 360 degrees
The whole page spins 360 degrees, and searching 'z or r twice' does the same: that was the button command for the manoeuvre in Nintendo's Star Fox 64.
Q 22Which arcade classic became Google's first playable Doodle in May 2010?
Pac-Man
Pac-Man: the playable logo marked the arcade game's 30th anniversary, copying its sounds and even its level-256 glitch, and proved so popular that Google gave it a permanent home.
Q 23Which pixelated animal stars in the endless-runner game Google's browser offers when you're offline?
A Tyrannosaurus rex
Android: co-founder Andy Rubin later said 'the exact same operating system we built for cameras' became the phone software that Google bought in 2005.
Q 14Which Google social network shut down for consumers in April 2019 after a data-exposure bug?
Plus
Plus: Google+ had been due to close in August 2019, but a second bug that exposed 52.5 million users' profile data made Google bring the shutdown forward to April.
Q 15Google Translate's 2006 engine trained on European Parliament text and which other body's?
The United Nations
The United Nations: its meetings are routinely translated by people into six languages, which gave Google's 2006 statistical engine a vast stock of matched text to learn from.
Q 16Google's suite of public hosting services, which began with App Engine in 2008, is formally called Google what?
Cloud Platform
Cloud Platform grew out of App Engine, and Google poured money into it for years to compete with Amazon and Microsoft: its cloud division did not report a profit until early 2023.
Q 17Which Google product launched in five US cities in 2007 and has since put cameras on snowmobiles, tricycles and backpacks?
Street View
Street View cars also scooped up data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as they drove past, which Google admitted in 2010 after German regulators asked to audit what the cars collected.
Q 18In what year did Google fold itself into a new parent, Alphabet Inc.?
2015
Google announced Alphabet in August 2015 and completed the reorganisation on October 2, 2015, so its moonshot units could sit beside Google rather than inside it.
Q 19What nickname does Google's headquarters campus at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway go by?
The Googleplex
The Googleplex has had its fields mown by goats: in spring 2009 Google brought in a herd instead of lawnmowers, calling it a lower-carbon way to cut the grass.
Q 20What is Google's unofficial corporate motto that guided the company for years?
Don't be evil
It appeared in the 2004 IPO prospectus; when Alphabet was formed its own code of conduct went with 'Do the right thing' instead.
A Tyrannosaurus rex: the designers picked a dinosaur as a joke about being thrown back to the 'prehistoric age' before Wi-Fi, and code-named the game Project Bolan after the singer of the band T. Rex.
Q 24Which Alphabet subsidiary was renamed from Google Life Sciences in December 2015?
Verily
Verily inherited Google's smart contact lens, meant to read a diabetic's glucose levels from tears, and shelved the project in 2018.
Q 25In what city is Google's headquarters located?
Mountain View
Mountain View: Google leased the 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway campus from Silicon Graphics in 2003 and bought it outright in 2006 for about $319 million.
Q 26Ruth Kedar's 1999 Google logo used primary colours except for a secondary colour on which letter?
The l
The l: Kedar gave that one letter green, a secondary colour, saying it 'brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules'.
Q 27Charlie Ayers, Google's first executive chef, had earlier cooked for which rock band?
Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead: Ayers had cooked for the band before joining Google in 1999; by the time he left in 2006 his team served about 4,000 lunches and dinners a day across ten campus cafes.
Q 28Which London AI research lab did Google acquire in 2014?
DeepMind
DeepMind: as part of the deal Google agreed to set up an artificial intelligence ethics board, and Facebook had reportedly tried and failed to buy the lab a year earlier.
Q 29Which crowdsourced navigation app from Israel did Google buy in June 2013?
Waze
Waze began in 2006 as FreeMap Israel; after the purchase its team stayed in Israel and the app kept running as a product of its own.
Q 30Which handset maker's 17,000 patents led Google to agree a $12.5 billion takeover in 2011?
Motorola Mobility
Motorola Mobility: Google announced the $12.5 billion deal in August 2011, then sold the handset business to Lenovo in 2014 for $2.91 billion while keeping most of the patents.