Today, September 27, 2023, marks the 25th birthday of Google as the Search engine giant celebrated this day with special doodle showing its logo evolution over the years. Who founded it and how it became famous explored.
Google is the largest platform in the world today as an internet search engine. Millions of users around the world use this search engine every day.
According to SimilarWeb, Google.com is ranked the first website in the entire world with over 80 billion traffic every month.
Per Worldometer, there are a little over 8 billion people in the world and ironically, it seems our grandchildren also use google every day.
If you Doodle immediately you opened Google on September 27, 2023, it means the seach engine giant and the king of internet was celebrating its anniversary or birthday. So, how old is Google right now? Read on for more about the website’s history, including how it became popular and its founders.
How old is Google?
Google was born on September 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, California, United States.
This means the platform is 25 years old.
Google Doodle commemorates its 25th birthday today with a special Doodle. Google is perpetually focused on the future but birthdays provide an opportunity for reflection.
Since that day in 1998, much has evolved including Google’s logo, as evident in today’s Doodle. However, the mission has steadfastly remained the same that is to organise the world’s information and ensure its universal accessibility and utility. Today, billions of people across the globe rely on Google to search, connect, work, play and for many more things. This doodle will be visible across the globe except for a few regions including Russia.
Google’s date of birth has changed several times
Google’s birthday was earlier celebrated on different dates. First the birthday was celebrated on 7th September, then on 8th and then on 26th September Google’s anniversary was celebrated. Then the company announced to officially celebrate Google’s birthday on September 27 because on this day Google had created a new record of page search number on its search engine. That means 1,2,3,4 etc. which we see at the bottom of the Google page.
But did you know Google started as just a research project? Read on for more about its history and origin.
What is the history of Google? Origin of Google 25 years ago explored.
Google Inc. was officially invented on September 27, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University in California.
Doctoral students Page and Brin met while pursuing computer science program in the late 1990s.
They discovered that both of them had a shared vision and that was to enhance the accessibility of the World Wide Web.
The tech gurus worked tirelessly from their dorm rooms and crafted a prototype for a better search engine.
They created an Internet search engine at the address Google.stanford.edu. Before officially launching it, Leary and Brin named it Backrub, which was later changed to Google.
At the beginning, the founders operated in a rented garage as the company’s first office.
As progress on the project mounted, they ultimately raised about $1 million from investors, family, and friends and set up shop in Menlo Park, California, under the name Google.
The name “Google” actually came from a graduate student at Stanford named Sean Anderson, according to Stanford’s David Koller. Anderson suggested the word “googolplex” during a brainstorming session, and Page countered with the shorter “googol.” Googol is the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes, while googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros.
Anderson checked to see if that domain name was taken, but accidentally searched for “google.com” instead of “googol.com.” Page liked that name even better, and registered the domain name for Brin and himself on September 15, 1997.
Google again rolled out its new operating structure, Alphabet, in summer 2015. Page explained the name in an exclamation-laden blog post:
“We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!”
But this certainly wasn’t the first time the duo had experimented with language. Back in 1996, before Google even existed as an entity, Page and Brin were already making up nerdy names for search engines.
According to Koller, and Google’s own website, Page and Brin’s 1996 foray into the world of search engines was initially called “BackRub.”
They called it this because the program analyzed the web’s “back links” to understand how important a website was, and what other sites it related to. BackRub operated on Stanford’s servers until it eventually took up too much bandwidth.
But by 1997, Page seems to have decided that the BackRub name just wasn’t good enough. According to Koller, Page and his officemates at Stanford began to workshop different names for the search engine technology, names that would evoke just how much data they were indexing and this birthed the name Google, one of the world’s most mentioned names or terms.
How did Google become popular?
The two main reasons Google became famous and well-known across the globe is first, clean user interface and second, better search results.
Due to these two reasons the company – whose headquarters is located at Googleplex, Mountain View, California, U.S. – gained popularity in the beginning and then it continued to grow.
As soon as the company received funding, Google launched new products and services and began to establish its dominance in the market.
The company made its mark in the market by introducing Android system for mobile including Gmail, YouTube and today we all use these services.
Recently the company has also launched Google Bard which is an AI tool. With its help the browsing experience is also going to change.
Subsidiaries of Google are;
- Adscape
- Android
- Endoxon
- FeedBurner
- ImageAmerica
- Kaltix
- YouTube
- ZipDash