It has been 22 years since the inception of Google, which has become synonymous with the word 'Search'. Google on September 27 celebrated its 22nd birthday with a doodle. One of the most user-friendly search engines, Google was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California.
The Google doodle of the day shows an animated G sporting a birthday hat and looking into a laptop while being surrounded by cake and gift boxes. Remaining five letters of the word Google are shown in four separate windows celebrating the day on a video call with G.
The doodle appropriately depicts the birthday celebrations in the present times as most parties have gone virtual due to the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic.
The first Google Doodle was in the honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Page and Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed.
Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. It was so well received that Hwang was appointed Google's chief doodler and since then, doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees called Doodlers. The team has created over 4,000 doodles for Google homepages around the world.
The now world-famous moniker is a play on a mathematical term that arose out of an unassuming stroll around the year 1920.
While walking in the woods of New Jersey, American mathematician Edward Kasner asked his young nephew Milton Sirotta to help him choose a name for a mind-boggling number: a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton’s reply? A googol! The term gained widespread visibility twenty years later with its inclusion in a 1940 book Kasner co-authored called “Mathematics and the Imagination.”
The name Google originated from a misspelling of the word 'googol', which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
In 2006, the word "Google" was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary as a verb. Google.com is the most visited website in the world.
