Search giant Google, which is known for being forgetful about the date of its own birthday, is celebrating its 21st birthday on September 27 this year with a retro doodle.
Google is now known for the artistic and interactive doodles they come up with to celebrate different occasions and the life and work of renowned personalities. This time, Google’s doodlers decided to what looked like a typical desktop we had at our homes 21 years ago.
This doodle traces the journey of two PhD students from Stanford, who co-founded the search engine -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They had together published an academic paper called ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’, which can be regarded as the blueprint for the Google we see today. They had conceptualised the prototype of a “large-scale search engine” in the paper, stating that it would have a database of “at least 24 million pages”.
September 27 is celebrated as Google’s birthday since the afore-mentioned paper was submitted on this day.
In the paper, they had even explained why they chose “Google” to be their system’s name. “It is a common spelling of googol (10 to the power of 100) and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”
Twenty-one years have passed since the duo had first envisioned a large-scale search engine and the company has seen exponential growth. It now boasts of hundreds of billions of webpages and has risen to become the most dominant force in the field of advertising. In fact, the web giant has now forayed into designing self-driven cars, android mobile software, and other innovations requiring technological know-how.
No one can deny that it was Google that ushered in the “age of information”, yet it is surprising that they have a problem arriving at the right birthdate of the search engine. While the Google team has been celebrating its birthday on September 27 since 2006, last year it was celebrated on September 26. Also, in the years 2004 and 2003, the birth anniversary was observed on September 7 and September 8, respectively.
Interestingly, Google Doodles have been synonymous with the company since its inception, when the first doodle observed the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle that year was designed by Page and Brin themselves to inform users beforehand that they would not be present to fix any technical glitch in case the servers crashed.
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