Well actually, not anymore – Google is now ranked “only” 4th by Fortune (it was 1st in 2008).

Anyway, Panda still thinks it’s worth taking a little virtual tour through their office in Zurich.

When, asked, what was it like working at Google, former Google employee Avinash Kaushik, says: “interesting, fun, surprising, insightful, inspiring, impactful, and more such words.”

These photos from their office in Zurich tell the same story, and I hope it will let you taste, what it’s like working at Google.

To make this post more fun, panda added all kind of fun facts bellow the photos. Hope you like it!

P.S.: also don’t forget to check: 50 Strange and Funny Google Suggestions

“Google got its name by accident. The founders misspelled the word “googol,” which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word was chosen to reflect the company’s goal of organizing the massive amount of information that is available on the Internet.”

“Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.”

“On any given day at Google there are brilliant people visiting and giving talks and lectures. Politicians, authors, professors, bright young folks, environmentalists, journalists, dignitaries, monks, Nobel prize winners, venture capitalists and so on and so forth.

I am astounded at the ability to have access to so many brilliant and leading minds. If I have some time then I can take an hour out, go listen to someone brilliant and stretch my brain on a wide variety of topics.”

“The Google home page is so sparse because the founders did not know HTML and just wanted to create a quick interface.”

“Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.”

“Google’s first data center was Larry Page’s dorm room.”

“Brett had always said one of the reasons I should work at Google was the food.

I still can’t get used to the fact that every day when I walk into a cafe the food is different and delicious and healthy and mostly organic.

At Google the food never gets boring because each cafe has a executive / sous chef and when you eat they’ll come chat with you and ask you what you think of the food (to your utter shock the first few times). They actually care.”

“When Page and Brin tried to find buyers to license their search technology, one portal CEO told them “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.””

“Google’s traffic doubled when they introduced their “Did you mean…” feature. This feature was made possible by a much-improved spell checker.”

“The search engine that Page and Brin were collaborating on was originally called BackRub, named for its ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given Web site.”

“The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.”

(Bamboo leaves for andrewarchy, nydailynews.com, kaushik.net, pinoytux.com, www.boredpanda.com)