Internet giant Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday on Monday. Google was founded on September 4, 1998. The company celebrated the birthday on this day for the first seven years. Later, it decided to shift the celebrations to September 27, coinciding with the announcement of the record number of pages that this search engine was indexing.
Though Google was established as a company on September 4, 1998, the google foundation was started in 1997. Co-founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google is the most widely-used search engine globally.
“In 1997, Sergey Brin, a graduate student at Stanford University, just so happened to be assigned to show Larry Page, who was considering Stanford for graduate school at the time, around campus. By the next year, the two Google co-Founders were building a search engine together in their dorm rooms and developing their first prototype. In 1998, Google Inc. was officially born,” read a post on the Google Doodle blog.
Indian origin Sundar Pichai is the current CEO of Google, and he was appointed on October 24, 2015, succeeded Page.
“Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same,” Google wrote in its statement.
Here are some Interesting Facts about Google You Never Come Across
1) Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a house made of Lego bricks to house their first server. It contained 10 disks of 4GB each.
Use pictures with credits Google (stanford.edu)
2) Google’s first office was a rented garage in Menlo Park, California. The founders rented their workspace from their friend, Susan Wojcicki, who is today the CEO of YouTube. The company operated from there for six months before moving out.
3) Google had to change its phone number. During the early period of the company, they accidentally published their phone number on the website.
“We were in a small office in Palo Alto and we had maybe less than 30 people there, or something like that. And we already had millions of users,” Larry Page told Time magazine. “We’d accidentally published our phone number on our website, and our phone number was just unusable. We had to get a new one then, because people just started calling us.”
4) Google’s first-ever Tweet in February 2009 read: “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.” It simply means “I’m feeling lucky”.
