Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday today, remembering its official formation on September 27, 1998. Netizens’ favourite search engine is celebrating its 23 years of existence with an animated chocolate cake on its homepage.
Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 at Stanford University. The search engine they built together went live on Stanford’s network in 1996. In 1998, Google Inc was officially born.
The animated doodle on Google’s homepage showed a cake with its lower-tier lifting the top tier to greet people, who were landing on the homepage of Google. Meanwhile, the birthday candle denotes the letter ‘L’ in ‘Google’.
“Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same,” Google wrote in its statement.
Few facts about the internet giant:
- Google was originally called BackRub because the program analysed the web’s “back links”.
- Initially, the company accidentally published its phone number on the website and was flooded with phone calls. Hence, it had to change its phone number.
- A house was built of Lego bricks to house their first server which contained 10 disks of 4GB each.
- Google’s first office was a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The founders rented their workspace from Susan Wojcicki, who is today the CEO of YouTube. The company worked out of the garage for six months before moving out.
- “Don’t be evil” used to be, perhaps, the most important phrase in the company’s corporate philosophy, until it was quietly removed in 2018.
- Google has smartly bought domains that resemble its name in a retort to “typosquatters” who benefit from spelling mistakes made by users.
Ms Kalinga