The whole world goes to Google to find the answer
SEP 27, 1998
NOBODY is quite sure why Google’s birthday is on September 27 – even if you Google it to find the answer.
Although the company was founded on September 4, 1998, it chose to blow its candles out 23 days later, and Tuesday sees them turn 18 years of age.
The Google domain name was registered on September 15, 1997, and the firm seems to have had birthday celebrations on the eighth of the month, and the 26th, but September 27 has stuck in recent years.
It’s ironic, really, this vagueness, because millions of internet users around the globe now turn to Google for just about every piece of knowledge they need.
Logging in to your bank account? Finding out the exact date those ancestors got married in the family tree? Checking the Lotto results?
Most of us head straight to Google as it’s our favourite search engine.
It had all started in 1996, the brainchild of two Stanford University students who were doing a research project.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to look at the World Wide Web as a kind of huge, globe-covering graph full of links branching out all over the place.
That’s pretty much what they would turn Google into.
By the 2000s, it was already many people’s favourite search engine, for its simple appearance.
Brin and Page had been against pop-up adverts, so any ads on the main Google search page were restricted to text-only, preserving its simple look.
By 2004, almost 85% of search requests on the net were done via Google, and today it has hundreds of offices in almost every country in the world, its colourful logo one of the mosticonic brands on Earth.
The company became so rich that it was able to buy YouTube and make various other
high-profile acquisitions, and it even have partnerships with the likes of NASA. Google certainly doesn’t think small!
When the Olympics or other major events are happening, Google Doodles often sees temporary, specialist Google logos, many just for certain territories.
It also has a quirky sense of humour.
Try typing the word “askew” into the Google search bar, and see what it does to your
computer’s appearance. No, it’s not the hangover from the night before!
Bing, Duck Duck Go, Quora and Boardreader are just a few of the many hopeful alternatives out there, but it seems that the majority of us stick with Google.
The word itself comes from Googol, a word the nine-year-old nephew of an American mathematician came up with for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Well, according to Google it is, anyway . . .
Its colourful logo is one of the most iconic brands on Earth