Google welcomes its 21st birthday with a nostalgic doodle of its search engine on a PC

Google, the most popular search engine of all time, and the one that’s grown to be a kingdom on the web in its own right, is now of legal drinking age in many parts of the world. As of 27 September 2019, Google is 21 years old! Google has commemorated the day with a doodle with a caricature of a vintage computer and a Google browser window on it. Google was founded in the dorm rooms of Stanford University in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. September that year was a busy month for the two of them because while the company now recognises 27 September 1998 as its founding day, Google was given its name and became an incorporated company on 7 September. [caption id=“attachment_7411271” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Google turns 21 and celebrates the day with a Doodle. Image: Google[/caption] Google was named by founders Larry and Sergey after its origin word ‘googol’, a mathematical term that translates to ‘10 raised to the power of 100’. They published a paper about launching a prototype of what could be a “large-scale search engine,” stating this:

We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.

Initially, they were in for tough competition with Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and Bing not that much later. Today, Google is used all over the world, in over 100 languages, and crawls the World Wide Web to answer trillions of search queries (and growing) every year. It is the world’s most popular search engine and infotech company today, by a long shot. Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc was estimated at $137 billion last year. At the time it was founded, the goal of “Google” was to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Well, you’ve done that and a whole lot more, Google. Happy 21st birthday!