From its humble beginnings back in 1998 to one of the most used search engines on the planet. Google has made its way to billions of hearts across the globe, answering trillions of answers every year. It is the second most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple Inc.), Google is valued at $309 billion.
Google has congratulated itself by creating a Doodle on its 21st birthday. Today’s Google Doodle shows 20-year journey of the top search engine. Google was established by Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin 21 years ago on 27 September 1998.
About Today’s Google Doodle
The special Doodle shows how a typical desktop computer looked like 21 years ago. The doodle also has a timestamp dating back to 27-9-98. It was an old computer is shown in today’s Google doodle. In this caricature of a blurred photograph, besides a computer of that era, there are also a mouse and a printer. The image of this old computer has been decorated with dots and stars around it. In this doodle, Google has used a photo of its office. Some media reports are claiming that the photo that was taken on 27 September 1998.
Some Facts about Google:
1) Google was created by two Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.
2) Originally called “BackRub”, the search engine giant Google, was founded by two PhD students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, on September 27, 1998 in their dormitories at California’s Stanford University.
3) Google was named BackRub in 1996. It is believed the name was a nod to the retrieving backlinks, based on the “web crawler” Page and Brin were working on during their Stanford days.
4) While launching the Google in 1998, its founders had published a paper about its prototype. Brin and Page organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful through its search engine ‘Google’.
5) Today, the worlds leading search engine, Google, operates in over 100 languages. The term Google is derived from a mathematical term ‘googol’ meaning ’10 raised to the
power of 100′.
6) YouTube became part of the Google family in 2006, after it was bought for more than $1.5 billion. At present, YouTube has nearly 2 billion monthly users, with more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute.
7) The America-based multinational technology company, Google, the search engine giant deals in Internet-related services and products that includes online advertising technologies, software, hardware and cloud computing.
8) While the company was founded on September 4, no one can pinpoint a particular date for Google’s birthdate. Since 2006, the celebration has been on September 27. In 2018, Google has celebrated its birthday on September 26. However, in 2004 and 2003, the date was Sept. 7 and Sept. 8, respectively.
9) Google is today considered as one of the ‘Big Four’ technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
10) On September 15, 1997, Page and Brin registered their project as Google. This was based on the mathematical term ‘googol’ which is one followed by 100 zeros.
11) Google owns domains for the common misspellings of its own name, such as gooogle.com, gogle.com and googlr.com
12) Google remained the world’s most visited website in 2019, as per Lifewire. It is even the top search item on other search engines such as Bing.
13) Google is so popular that it has entered the common lexicon. It was officially added as a verb to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2006, which defined it as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web”.
14) Google’s initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.
15) Google’s headquarter is known as the Googleplex is based in California’s Silicon Valley.
16) Google was the first big tech company to offer free meals to employees. It also allows employees to bring in their dogs to work.
17) Google employees in the US get death benefits which guarantee that the surviving spouse will receive 50 percent of their salary every year for the next decade.
18) The Google logo that the company used from 1998 had the first capital G in green, subsequent logos have had the G in blue.
19) The Google logo also goes colourless on days to mark major tragedies. It was first used in April 2010 to mark the air disaster that killed, among others, Polish President Lech Kaczyński. In 2018 it went colorless on the death of George H.W. Bush and in 2019 it did so on Memorial Day celebrated in the US.
20) Gmail was launched on April Fool’s Day that led to many people thinking that the application was a joke.
21) Google’s search bar has a nifty feature that helps users with pronouncing big numbers. For instance, if you key in the number in this format: ‘17034=english’ and hit enter, the results will show: seventeen thousand thirty-four.
22) Launched 2001, the Google Image Search was inspired by the worldwide interest in singer Jennifer Lopez’s 2000 Grammy outfit – the now iconic green Versace dress. At the time, there was no tool to help see it despite it being the most popular search query on Google.
23) Google’s Android operating system has gained leading market share in the majority of the countries. In the 14 years since Google acquired the brand, Android owns 87 percent of the Operating System market share worldwide.
24) As part of its green initiative, Google rents 200 goats (plus herder and a border collie) to “mow” the weeds and brush around headquarters.
25) Initially, the Google was overshadowed by the rivals such as Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, but it kept growing and today it is the world’s most popular websites, with its parent
company Alphabet Inc worth an estimated $137b last year.
26) The internet was ‘broken’ by a programmer at Google in 2009, after they accidentally added ‘/’ to Google’s blocked website registry. There is a ‘/’ in nearly every website created, so nothing online could be accessed.
27) Google removed the ‘I am feeling lucky’ button from its search bar because the company had to incur millions of dollars every year to enable users to skip advertisements and head directly to the top of the search.
28) Google on February 2009 tweeted for the first time on Twitter and as geeky as it could, the tweet read, “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”
Those who are not aware of binary language, it means “I’m feeling lucky.”
29) In July 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million. Android is a mobile operating system which is designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In addition, Google has developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars, and Wear OS for wearables, each with a specialized user interface. Variants of Android are also used on game consoles, digital cameras, PCs and other electronics.
30) Sundar Pichai (Pichai Sundararajan), an Indian-American, was on August 10, 2015 named CEO of the company, replacing Larry Page who is heading as CEO of Alphabet
Inc.
31) In November 2017, Google bought 536 megawatts of wind power from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma, making its operations run on 100 percent renewable energy.
32) A Google Doodle is product of Google that appears temporarily on special occasions in place of Google’s permanent logo on the homepage. The doodle marks important festivals, people, achievements and holidays. The first-ever Google Doodle was made in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle featured the iconic man behind the second O in Google’s logo.
33) “Backrub” was actually one of the earliest names for Google back in the mid-1990s when its core function was to analyze backlinks on the web.
The name “Backrub” was derived from a series of algorithms that were used for calculating ranks from the backlinks generated from a particular webpage. The search engine gained immense popularity. In 1999, Brin and Page opened their maiden office in a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki in California. In an interesting turn of events, the name “Google” is a mathematical play on the term “googol” – denoting number one followed by 100 zeros. The name of Google is actually misspelled as founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to use “googol” (100 zeroes after 1), which would have represented unlimited information.
34) The lack of any colour and design on Google’s homepage is because the founders had no knowledge of HTML.