5 Google Easter Eggs & Secrects Every User Should Know

For an average user like a bunch of my friends, Google is just a search engine, the tech behind Gmail and YouTube and someone who is responsible for the bunch of apps that come pre-installed on one’s android smartphone. Well am here to tell you that, Google is way more than that. From drones to advanced machine learning, Google has stepped into almost every booming tech sector out there.

1. Google knows literally everything about you.
   Google loves tracking your activities online. It knows about your search history, the locations you visit and even your voice searches. The data it possesses is enough to trace down your interests and everything you love.
   So why does Google want to behave like that typical nose-poking aunt you hate? Well, Google makes good bucks by selling your data to the advertisers indirectly. (More on that later). Of course, advertisers love to sneak inside their potential customer’s minds. You can safely conclude that for advertisers, your data is equivalent to gold.
   How do you know what information you are sharing? Well, Google has a personalised page dedicated to this, known as “My Account” . The page lets you control some of the things you’re sharing. We recommend you to check it out if you’re a privacy buff.

2. Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) enabled Google Translate to learn on its own through examples.
   Well, this is not actually a secret, neither is it haunting. Google officially announced this fact some time ago, but interestingly, nobody gave much damn about it.
   What feat did Google Translate achieve lately? Quoting from an article on Google Research Blog:
   “In “Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation” , we address this challenge [challenge of translating between multiple languages] by extending our previous GNMT system, allowing for a single system to translate between multiple languages. Our proposed architecture requires no change in the base GNMT system but instead uses an additional “token” at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language to translate to. In addition to improving translation quality, our method also enables “Zero-Shot Translation” — translation between language pairs never seen explicitly by the system.”
   In layman’s language, GNMT empowers Google to translate between languages it has never seen before.
   Artificial intelligence has progressed leaps and bounds, isn’t it?

3. Google is hiding a few places on Google Earth.
   Try navigating to Baler Lake (Canada) on Google Earth. You will be surprised when you see this:
   Google is hiding a few more places on Google Earth. These include, but are not restricted to Ramstein Air Force Base (Germany), Pacific Northwest (USA) and Mobil Oil Corporation (Buffalo).
   Why does it do that? The reason still remains unknown.

4. Google dreams of transforming its assistant to a Star-Trek computer.
   Imagine yourself giving a command to a Star-Trek computer ten years down the line. How does it feel? Yes, Google has already plunged to transforming this dream into reality.
   The company believes that machine learning has advanced to this extent and they can achieve this very soon. While you might have dealt with several assistants already, including Google’s very own assistant, this would be an entirely new experience.
   If this becomes a reality, Google would secure an integral place in the market and rule the internet era for many more years.

5. 96% of Google’s Income comes from selling your stuff.
   Why do you think Gmail, Maps, Drive and almost everything else from the house of Google comes free of cost? Why does Google want you to use the apps for free while they gladly bear the expenses?
   Ever heard of this quote?
   By using these apps (and almost every service offered by Google), you agree to let the apps send information about your likes and dislikes, what you love to do and what you don’t, which products you buy, what you like to watch online, what you believe in and what not.
   And what does Google do with this information? Simple. They sell this data to advertisers for money. Advertisers use this data to sell more targeted products and servic