Happy Birthday Google: Search Engine Turns 21 Today

Google celebrated its 21st birthday with an adorable and special doodle on Friday.

The doodle is a throwback photo of a bulky computer, which shows a Google search screen, lying on the side on a table with the time stamp of ‘98 9 27’ written on the right hand corner of the image.

The search engine was founded by two PhD students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, in their dormitories at Stanford, California 21 years ago in September 1998.

Later, the two had published a paper about launching a prototype of a large-scale search engine.

Before inventing Google, the two had also developed a search algorithm known as ‘Backrub’. However, the two zeroed in on the name Google for their project because it resembled the name googol which is a mathematical term meaning 10 raised to the power of 100.

They mentioned this in their paper too. “We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol and fits well with our goal of building a very large-scale search engine,” they wrote.

Interestingly, September 27 was not always Google’s official birthday. Until 2005, the website celebrated its birthday on September 7. But since 2005, it has marked its birthday on September 8, September 26 and, recently, September 27.