Today, September 27th, Google celebrates its 23rd birthday. The search engine posted a lovely doodle on its homepage to commemorate the occasion. The sweet Doodle were neither animated or hyperlinked before, they were simply photos with hover text discussing the subject or wishing a happy holiday season. But now, a two-tiered cake with a candle (swapping for the “L” in the doodle) and the number 23 carved on it appears in the doodle.
In a bio accompanying the Doodle, Google stated that billions of searches are conducted on Google every day in more than 150 languages around the world, and that while much has changed since Google’s early days, from its first server housed in a cabinet made of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers around the world, its mission of making the world’s information accessible has remained the same.
As said by someone, one fortuitous contact can alter the direction of your life. In the case of Google, an accidental meeting between two computer experts altered the course of the Internet and millions of people’s lives.
When Lawrence Page who was 22 years old and Sergey Brin with age 21 met for the first time at Stanford University’s Computer Science department, they disagreed on practically everything. Page had just arrived at Stanford to pursue a PhD in computer science after graduating from Michigan University whereas Brin was also a PhD student and in charge of showing him around.
Page and Brin developed a collaboration that altered the course of history in the years between 1995 and 1996. There was an algorithm BackRub built by the two of them that crawled the web to grasp its mathematical hierarchy and rank web pages based on the number of reputable links directed at them.
This Google name comes from the mathematical term googol which means one observed by 100 zeroes.
Page and Brin registered a domain name for their search engine on September 15, year 1997. Their search engine was consuming the majority of Stanford’s bandwidth in the past. Google.com was the new domain name.
Andy Bechtolsheim who was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems (Sun Microsystems was a computer hardware and software business that faced market competition at the time), wrote a $100,000 check to Google which did not exist at the time.
Brin and Page incorporated the corporation in California on September 4 and opened a bank account in the newly registered company’s name to use Bechtolsheim’s check.
The garage of Susan Wojcicki in California became the new company’s headquarters. Then Susan Wojcicki became Google’s marketing manager in the following year and is now the CEO of YouTube. Google embarked on a meteoric rise to become one of the world’s most powerful technology companies from there.
Google now offers more than just its basic search engine with products ranging from cloud-based productivity software such as Sheets, Docs, and Slides to smartphone manufacturing like Pixel phones. Google has made considerable contributions to artificial intelligence and software technology research and development.
Also, recently a big quantum computing breakthrough was made by the IT behemoth.
So, we wish Google a very Happy Birthday today.
