You must have already known if you have visited Google’s homepage that the search engine is celebrating it’s 18th birthday today. But there has been a lot of confusion regarding the date as no one actually knows as to when was Google founded but as per Wikipedia it was founded on September 4.
Though before that it’s been a little confusing. In 2005, Google celebrated it’s birthday on September 26. In 2004, it was September 7 and in 2003 it was September 8. And some also believe that Google was actually found in 1996 instead of 1998. In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a research project at Stanford University when the idea of a search engine ranking page on the basis of sites linked to it struck their mind.
Regarding the Google Doodle, the first one came up in 2002 with the same date as today and it has celebrated its birthday through the Google Doodle since then.
Page and Brin named it Google by taking the idea from the word ‘googol’ which is a number equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Jumping back in to the history, Page and Brin always wanted to expand Google and not limit it to just a search engine platform. Hence, Google Images was launched in 2001 which gave users access to 250 million images. And soon in 2002, Google News was launched which now has over 50,000 news sources with 70 regional editions. Going by the pattern, Gmail was launched in 2004 which is the most used email service today with over one billion users. Another year, another launch as Google Earth was unveiled in 2005 allowing users to take a virtual journey to their destination. YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Two years later in 2008, Google Chrome was unveiled which is now the most used web browser. 2008 was the year when Google also released the first official version of Android which is now the most used Operating System on smartphones. A lot of other services such as Google Maps, Google Drive etc. have also been released.
Last year, Google restructured and became a subsidiary to a parent company Alphabat which is now headed by Page and Brin. While Google is headed by India’s Sundar Pichai.
Google buy’s a lot of companies every year and we can’t imagine how big it is but still it has become one of the most crucial lifelines of internet today. What was your first search on Google today? Let us know in the comment section below.