Happy 22nd Birthday, Google! If Google were a human, it could celebrate with a drink. But that would probably fry its monitor, so it would therefore have to succumb to some other tactical forms of celebratory avarice.
Twenty-two years ago, two Stanford Ph.D. students, American computer scientists and Internet entrepreneurs Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page published a paper about launching a prototype of a “large-scale search engine.”
"We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines,” the students wrote.
Today, Google is one of the world's leading search engines. It operates globally in over one hundred languages, answering trillions of search queries each year!
The scale is large, to say the least.
Although it wasn't founded on this exact date all of those years ago, Google has celebrated its founding on multiple different dates. Recently, the company selected September 27 as its "birthday."
Its founding goes back to 1995 when Page was considering Stanford University for graduate school and student Brin was assigned to show him around. While in their dorm rooms, they built a search engine which was originally called Backrub.
Backrub later was renamed Google. In 1998, German electrical engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and self-made billionaire Andy Bechtolsheim wrote the two young men a check for $100,000 to get Google, Inc. off of the ground.
Moving to a garage in Menlo Park, California, Google debuted their first Doodle in August 1998 as well.
Looking a bit different from the highly animated Doodles the company produces today, it was a stick figure in the logo that told visitors staff members were at the Burning Man Festival.
It's unclear if Google will celebrate its big day with a Doodle, but the company did put one out for its 20th birthday.
The Doodle showed people around the world typing their questions into the search bar, which included, What is Google? What will happen on Y2K? Is Pluto still a planet? and What is auto-tune?
It ended with a thank-you message to its users, which was written in multiple languages.
Google also did a Doodle in previous years. For its 15th birthday, it came with a message accompanying the Doodle.
American Google Doodle team lead Ryan Germick did his best to acknowledge the changing date of the company's birthday celebrations.
"When's Google's birthday? I'm not sure even we know – we've celebrated on September 7th, 8th, 26th, and, most recently the 27th," Germick wrote.
The employee added that the first Doodle was posted on the website before Google was incorporated, which took place in September 1998.
In the decades since its founding, Google has exponentially expanded its capabilities to include new features and search capabilities.
One feature that Google implemented in the years since its inception was the ability to view trending topics.
In 2018, the top five searches were: World Cup, Hurricane Florence, Mac Miller, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.
Once dwarfed by other search engines like Lycos and AltaVista, Google has also grown financially.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, is worth an estimated $762.5 billion, according to Business Insider!
Regardless, Happy 22nd Birthday to a company that, for better or worse, helped usher in the information age.
@GoogleDoodles
@nichecinema
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