Gadgetory

welcome to top 5 I'm your host Aya's Akhtar let's talk a little bit about Google the company is famous for its April Fool's gags but Google has made some very real business moves it were really hard to believe today we're counting down the top 5 unbelievable Google moves at number 5 driverless cars let me get this straight Google a search engine company advertising wizard built a driverless car sure it did no really it did back in October 2010 Google told the world that it had developed technology for cars that can drive themselves why Google said our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents 3 up people's time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use it still sounds futuristic and it still sounds nuts number 4 Google bias YouTube in October 2006 Google announced it purchased YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars in stock back then YouTube was mired in copyright infringement lawsuits why on earth would Google buy a company with such liabilities on the same day as the acquisition YouTube cleaned up a couple of spots with Universal Sony BMG and CBS display mercy net is owned by CBS YouTube at the time was about two years old this was a huge gamble for Google and it seemed to work out just fine at number 3 google announces Internet by balloon that sounds made-up to right it does sound fake but Google announced Project loon in June 2013 loon was the product of Google X Google's experimental lab the company said it believes it could be possible to build a ring of balloons flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds that provides internet access to the earth below the pilot program started in New Zealand with 50 testers number two restructuring Google becomes a subsidiary of another company that sounded crazy enough that I had to check the date twice after realizing it was August and not April and reading the press release a couple of times I finally believed it Google's co-founders moved to a newly formed company called alphabet which in turn owns Google Google stock turns into alphabet stock many of the crazy things that necessarily make sense for Google to be running became their own entities outside of Google but owned by the same parent company you got all that google chrome head who used to be the head of android is now the head of all of Google to story it's time to check Twitter I asked you fine viewers what moves you thought were unbelievable Mary Jo pitched in with this idea Google+ being a competitor to Facebook Eloy mentioned Google's contact lens that measures glucose levels yes that's a real thing David mentioned the killing of Google Reader however a lot of you picks a certain announcement and it's the number one unbelievable Google move the introduction of Gmail this couldn't be real Google will give you one gigabyte of email space in 2004 oh and Google announced this on April 1st 2004 this has to be a joke right obviously we know this turned out to be completely true and the service has been around so long that you snickered people with other email addresses don't you by the way Google didn't make this easy to believe when it announced the service and a blog post quote the idea that there could be a better way to handle email caught the attention of a Google engineer millions of Eminem's later Gmail was born should this list be the top results were crazy list on a Google search let me know on Twitter I'm at Aya's if you want to find me on Google+ I'm there too I'm plus I as actor for more top fives like this visit top-5 dot cnet.com thank you for watching and I'll see you next time