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July 28, 2006
The Commonwealth Bank was criticised for issuing staff with a detailed handbook on how they should dress and look -- including its preferred colour and brand of women's bras. 24/7 Apple store in New York never closes.
Apple opened a brand new retail store on New York’s storied Fifth Avenue. What's behind a name?
Some fun facts about Google search engine, The Washington Post
Do you Google? The answer is probably yes. Each second more than 2,000 Internet searches using Google take place. However, nobody ''Googled'' before 1998, when the Internet search company was created by two graduate students at Stanford University. These fun, weird facts about Google, the increasingly popular and sometimes controversial Internet company, were collected for KidsPost by David A. Vise, who has written a book for grown-ups about Google.
The name comes from ''googol,'' a math term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google posts artistic, colorful versions of its logo (called Google Doodles) to celebrate holidays and special occasions such as the Olympics.
Google can be a calculator: Spell out an equation in words, use numbers and symbols, or type in a combination of both. People who work at Google (its offices are called the Googleplex) in California are called Googlers. They get three meals a day and unlimited snacks (M&M's are in bowls everywhere) and can play beach volleyball, roller hockey and other games free. That may sound great, but they still have to get their work done and sometimes that means long hours.
The Googleplex has high-tech toilets with heated seats and controls for washing and drying so you never need toilet paper. Many people don't ''search'' anymore -- they ''Google.'' The word also has become a verb in German (googlen), Finnish (googlata, pronounced GOOG-lah-ta) and Japanese (guguru, pronounced GOO-gu-ru). Google uses more than 100,000 personal computers, wired together and linked by custom software, to do searches in less than a second.
Interested in what's next from Google? Do a search for ''Google Labs'' and see what Googlers are working on. Google is making electronic copies of millions of library books so that anyone with an Internet connection can read them. You can search many books at www.print.google.com. But many authors and book publishers say it's not fair to use their work without paying.
Google has billions of photos that you can see free of charge. Just click on Google Images and do a search. A photo from Google might come in handy on that next school project.