Google Celebrates Its 12th Birthday
Happy 12th Birthday Google!
It looks like today we’re going to have to talk about history, more precisely, the way Google started out. See, Google, unlike most other companies, isn’t celebrating its birthday on the day when it started out, or on the day when its first employee was hired. Rather, the company seems to have picked a completely different date for the occasion. Let’s start by saying that apparently, today, September 27, is Google’s birthday.
In 2005, the press was eagerly awaiting September 15, which as far as they knew, was Google’s 10th birthday. Since a company celebrates ten years from birth only once, people were surprised to see that Google came up with absolutely nothing on the occasion. In fact, the company didn’t even count it as a birthday. Apparently, it takes a lot to figure out when Google’s day is.
Google's Cake
In January 1996, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin allegedly started working on BackRub, which is the early version of Google. According to AFP, google.com was registered by the two in 1997, on September 15, which is why most people considered this date to be Google’s birthday for a very long time. Also the first technical spec is from September 20, as TechCrunch reports, while the first employee was hired on September 21, 1998. Thus it makes a whole lot of sense that the company’s birthday is celebrated on September 27. But, hey, as many before me have said, it’s their birthday and they can celebrate it whenever they want to. Today, they’re celebrating with a brand new doodle which was created by Wayne Thiebaud, an US painter who is well known for works of cakes, pastries or boots. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in such object and he has painted Google a pretty nice birthday cake, on the occasion of its 12th birthday.
Even though Google is getting old, it’s without question the world’s most popular search engine. This year we got to see the launch of plenty of new features and services, either search engine related or not, from the company. One of the company’s major achievements this year was the launch of Google Instant, which happened not so long ago. If previously you had to actually type a whole querry in the search box and then hit enter to get the results, as of now, you’ll be able to get results as you type the word. The search engine basically “reads your mind” while you’re searching for something.
Judging by its success in the past twelve years and the high number of improvements and new releases, Google will probably remain the king of search for many years from now. Some people will argue that Bing is becoming quite a viable competitor and will grown even further after the recent partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft. But as far as I’m concerned, when the vast majority of people are looking for something on the web, they’ll just go “Google” it. This expression pretty much sums everything up.
