Google celebrates 15th birthday by taking you back to 1998 homepage

It’s been 15 years since Google turned our online lives upside down. It’s hard to imagine any work getting done these days without a quick trip to the many Google services. As part of celebrations Google has ensured that users can go back in time and see the Google homepage from 1998. When you type Google in 1998 in the Chrome search bar or in Google search, the results takes you back to the original Google homepage. It’s pretty cool, when you look at how simple the 1998 page was and how different the 2013 page is with Google Drive, Gmail, Apps, Google Plus, etc. Check out the 1998 Google homepage here. Google also invited some reporters to the Menlo Park garage where the company began. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had started the company in the garage of their friend Susan Wojciki’s. [caption id=“attachment_1136781” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Screengrab of the Google Homepage from 1998.[/caption] Wojcicki told The Verge about how Google came to be started in her garage. She said, “In 1998, Sergey and Larry first had gotten funded … and they were looking for office space. I had purchased this house … and was worried about covering the mortgage.” Google’s logo today also has an interactive doodle where you can play birthday pinata with the Google logo’s. The second G in google is blindfolded and you have to try and get as many candies as you can from the star that’s hanging in the middle. Google has also introduced the new Hummingbird search algorithm. Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search, told reporters on Thursday that the company launched its latest “Hummingbird” algorithm about a month ago and that it currently affects 90 percent of worldwide searches via Google.