Google celebrates its 23rd birthday today

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Google has turned 23rd today. The search giant is celebrating the birthday with an animated doodle that features a cake with the number 23. Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page on September 4, 1998. The company marked its birthday on September 4 every year for its first seven years. It was later decided to shift the birthday celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that everyone’s favourite search engine was indexing.

Chennai-born, IIT-educated Sundar Pichai is the current CEO of Google. Pichai succeeded Page in October 2015, and later went on to also become the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, which was created in October 2015, through a restructuring of Google.

How it started

The doodle, through which Google marks important dates, is also 23, as it was around this time back in 1998 that Google created a special animation on its homepage to celebrate the long-running ‘Burning Man’ festival which happens every year in Black Rock City, Nevada.

Google, a part of the ‘Big Four’ tech companies– Apple, Facebook and Amazon are the other three- specialises in several internet based products such as cloud services, advertising, etc. apart from its popular, and globally most used, search engine.

The company was founded as part of a PhD project on which its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working. According to news reports, the two first came up with the idea of indexing web pages back in 1995. And a year later, they had created the world’s first search engine, which was initially named ‘BackRub’. It used links to determine the importance of individual web pages.

On its 23rd birthday

The official post on Google’s blog marking its 23rd birthday, reads: ‘Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same. Happy 23rd Birthday, Google.’

The company’s headquarters– nicknamed ‘the Googleplex’– are located in Mountain View, California.