Happy Birthday Google!
Search engine giant Google is celebrating its 21st birthday today with a special Doodle of a throwback photo of a bulky computer, which shows a Google search screen.
Funny thing is that the real date when Google was founded remains something of a mystery that even the company admits it does not know exactly when it began.
The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two Ph.D. students, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at California’s Stanford University. And Google usually marks its birthday on September 27 each year.
Although without much explanation, Google’s birth date has changed over the years. In 2005 it marked the anniversary on September 7, supposedly marking the day it became an incorporated company.
However, the company actually filed incorporation papers on September 4, 1998, but has never used this date as its birthday. Additionally, to confuse us more, Google sent out their celebratory doodle on September 8 in 2003, and a day earlier in 2004.
Nevertheless, September 27 appears to have stuck through chance, because that’s the date when the company first celebrated its birthday, back in 2002.
“When is Google’s birthday? I’m not sure even we know,” wrote Google employee Ryan Germick in 2013, adding:
“Still, while there are some differing opinions about when to bust out the candles and cake, one fun fact is that our first Doodle was posted even before Google was officially incorporated (30 August, 1998 vs 4 September, 1998).”
1998 was a time when the World Wide Web was still an infant, but Page and Brin’s idealistic goal was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Two years earlier, Page and Brin had developed a search algorithm known as ‘Backrub’ and therefore chose the name Google for their new project because it recalled the word ‘googol’; a mathematical term meaning ‘10 raised to the power of 100’.
The verb ‘google’, meaning ‘to search for something online’, has become so widely used that it was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.
Initially, the search giant was overshadowed by rival search engines such as Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, but Google has grown to become the world’s most popular website, with more than 63,000 searches made every second.
Today, Google operates all over the world and in over 100 languages, answering trillions of search queries each year.
As of September 2019, Google’s net worth is estimated at around $300 billion and the parent company Alphabet is estimated to be worth $900 billion making them the third most valuable company after Amazon and Apple
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