Google Named Best Place to Work by Fortune Magazine

While watching Oprah yesterday, my mouth agape, I kept waiting to hear the but; as in "Google is the best place to work in America, but..." BUT it never came. Google truly is the best place to work. In January of 2007, Fortune Magazine certainly got that right. Known for its relaxed corporate culture, Google's corporate philosophy is based on many casual principles including, "You can be serious without a suit" and, "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."

And fun it is. Here are just some of the many perks of working at Google:

1. You can carry your pet to work anytime you want
2. There is onsite daycare for your kids
3. There is an onsite medical facility with a complete staff of doctors and nurses
4. There is an onsite massage facility.
5. Employees have a playground with grown up toys and games like volleyball
6. Employees have a recreation room with video games and pool tables
7. All of this is free; everything-- lunch in any of Google's 13 gourmet cafeterias, sodas, snacks, you name it, it's free.

A company started in a garage in 1996 as a research project by two young, geeky Stanford entrepreneurs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google is now worth $150 million. Several of the initial employees ended up millionaires after buying shares in Google stock.

Larry Page's vision was that a search engine which analyzed the relationships between websites could produce better results than the techniques that currently existed. (The search engines in existence then ranked results according to how many times a term appeared on a page.) "Backrub" was the initial name of Google, due to the fact that the system checked back links to estimate a site's importance.

The name Google is a play on the term googol, which is the large number 10¹⁰⁰. Declaring its code of conduct as "Don't Be Evil," Page and Brin believed that in the long term they would be better served by a company that did good things for the world. Add to that vision a quirky sense of humor and you end up with the best place to work in America.