Google celebrated its 21st birthday with a special Doodle on Friday. The search engine was founded on September 27, 1998 by two PhD students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, in their dormitories at California’s Stanford University and was originally called “BackRub”. It was later renamed “Google”.
Friday’s Google Doodle portrays a photograph of the search engine on a box computer and is dated September 27, 1998. Brin and Page had published a paper about launching a prototype of a “large-scale search engine” with a goal to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
The PhD students named their algorithm “Google” as it recalled the word ‘googol’, which is a mathematical term meaning ‘10 raised to the power of 100’. At this time, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy
Today, Google, which operates in over 100 languages, is the world’s leading search engine with its parent company Alphabet Inc worth an estimated $137 billion last year. However, in its formative years, Google was overshadowed by rival search engines Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.
Interestingly, Google’s birthday has changed over the years. The website celebrated its birthday on September 7 until 2005, apparently marking the day it became an incorporated company. However, it since 2005 it has marked its birthday on September 8, September 26 and, more recently, September 27.
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