Google is marking its 25th birthday today with some playful interactive features.
To celebrate the milestone, those using Google’s search bar today will see an animated Google Doodle, that takes you through a timeline of the Google logo before changing into a 25 to mark its birthday.
When users search the term ‘Happy Birthday’, they will also see confetti fall down their screen, again in commemoration of the platform’s 25th birthday.
So let’s take a look at the importance of the Google Doodle and the platform’s history.
A brief history of Google
Google was actually founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were university students. The duo decided to name the platform ‘Google’ as a play on words of the mathematical term ‘Googol’ that stands for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
It wasn’t long before the Google brand started to expand. In the early 2000s, Google launched Gmail, as well as Google Maps and Google Earth. It also went on to acquire the popular streaming platform, YouTube.
In the years that followed, Google received a bunch of investments and has quickly evolved into one of the most well-known search platforms around the globe.
When is Google’s official birthday?
Google Inc. was incorporated in 1998, and the platform marks its official birthday on September 27.
To celebrate Google’s quarter-of-a-century milestone, the platform has launched a special Google Doodle for its users.
Who was it founded by?
American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still PhD students when they launched Google in 1998. Their mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Prior to this, the pair had actually created a search engine that used links to rank the importance of pages on the internet called Backrub.
Backrub was renamed Google and in 1998 the students received a $100,000 cheque from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. This marked the official birth of Google Inc.
When was the first Google Doodle created?
The Google Doodle has been around almost as long as the platform itself.
Back in August 1998, the Google founders decided to let visitors know that they were offline as they headed to Burning Man festival. So, they decided to draw a burning man stick figure within their Google logo on the homepage.
In 2000, founders Larry and Sergey asked an intern at the time, Dennis Hwang, to create a doodle for Bastille Day. The popularity of these early Google Doodles prompted founders to make this a regular trend.
The Google Doodle has since become a staple of the Google Search engine platform, and a team of ‘doodlers’ are tasked with creating innovative logos to mark certain milestones and recognize historic figures.
According to Google, over 5,000 doodles have been created around the world so far.
Which Google Doodles have been created in the past?
Nowadays, a team of doodlers have regular meetings to discuss which events to mark with a doodle. Users can also submit their ideas for a Google Doodle to doodleproposals@google.com.
While the doodles originally celebrated national holidays, this has recently evolved to mark birthdays of prominent figures and fun, noteworthy goings on.
In the Google Doodle archive, viewers can browse through the history of Google’s doodles. These include everything from recognizing the work of Alan Rickman and highlighting climate change on Earth Day, to a celebration of scones.
