Google, Happy 21st Birthday

Staff Writer September 27, 2019

1 minute read

Menlo Park-based multinational firm; Google is known for celebrating prominent events and days with its renowned doodles. Today the company celebrates its 21st birthday with a doodle that features a 90’s like computer that were called MPC (Multimedia Personal Computer). The doodle in the computer shows Google search homepage and a date stamp of September 27, 1998.

September 27th is, however, not Google’s actual birthday. The company was incorporated as Google a California privately held company on September 4th, 1998. However, they didn’t celebrate Sep. 4th as their birthday rather celebrated Sep. 7th as its birthday till 2005 when they now changed to Sep. 27th.

Google’s search engine — which is one its products, is with no doubts the biggest and most used globally. According to reports, initially, the search engine was called “BackRub” later renaming to “Google”.

“We chose our systems name, Google, because it’s a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines,” Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote in 1998 in a paper published about launching a prototype of a “large-scale search engine.”

Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. whose Chief Executive is Larry Page while Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google having replaced Larry.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then students at Stanford University. In October 2015, Alphabet Inc. was created through a corporate restructuring of Google. Page and Brin assumed executive roles in Alphabet Inc. with Page serving as CEO and Brin as President.

To-date, Google is considered one of the big four tech companies in the world along Amazon, Apple and Facebook. It is also considered at the 4th most valuable tech company with a valuation of USD$818 billion.

What started out as a Web search engine has since turned into a massive conglomerate.

Today, Google operates all over the world in over 104 languages and can translate 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice in “conversation mode”, and 27 via real-time video in “augmented reality mode.