Google turns 23, celebrates birthday with doodle on homepage

Global search engine Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday on Monday (September 27, 2021). The US technology company is celebrating the occasion with a special doodle on its homepage. Today’s Google doodle features a cake with “23” written on top of it, with a birthday candle substituting for “L” in “Google”.

The search engine got the name Google from the mathematical term “googol” which refers to one followed by 100 zeroes. In 1997, Google co-founder Sergey Brin – then a graduate student at Stanford University – met its other co-founder Larry Page, who was considering Stanford for graduate school at the time. By the next year, the two Google co-founders were building a search engine together in their dorm rooms and developing their first prototype. In 1998, Google Inc. was officially born. Google actually went public in 2004 and was reorganised as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. in 2015. Though the company, for the first seven years, observed its birth anniversary on the said date, that year, it decided to shift the celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that this search engine was indexing. The search engine, as of today, enables searches in more than 150 languages around the globe.

Today, Google not only offers its core search engine service but has expanded everywhere from cloud-based productivity software such as Docs, Sheets and Slides, to smartphone manufacturing such as Pixel phones. Google has contributed a significant amount of research and developments in software technology and artificial intelligence. Recently, the tech-giant has also achieved a major breakthrough in quantum computing.