When is Google’s Birthday? Why are people confused about Google’s Birthday?
One of the never-ending discussions is when was actually Google founded. Many different people have different views and many have different dates about Google’s birthday. So when is Google’s birthday?
When is Google’s Birthday?
In this article, we attempt to solve this chicken and egg question about Google! In the summer of 1995, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford.
Larry Page was considering attending Stanford for grad school, and Sergey Brin was the second-year grad student assigned to show him around.
Larry Page decided to attend Stanford. Brin and Page were not instant friends – they actually thought the other was “obnoxious,” but they debated each other into friendship and partnership. The two young grad students started collaborating on a new search engine project together.
In January of 1996, the Google founders started working on a new search engine called BackRub.
Larry Page began the project as his doctoral thesis. The idea was to crawl and rank search results based loosely on the idea of “citation,” which is mainly an academic currency.
In scholarly research, academics keep track of citation count (who is citing your work) as a count of how authoritative your writing is. This still holds true today, and Google Scholar will tell you your citation count among other things. (Even though Google Scholar gives you citation counts, most academics prefer using Web of Science when they have access.)Larry Page worked on this new BackRub search engine as a way to translate the idea of citation count into the growing World Wide Web.
In fact, the idea to make it a “search engine” occurred after the project evolved. Originally he was interested in graphing the World Wide Web, and then both Page and Brin realized that this would make a fantastic consumer search engine.
Previously, search engines either crawled based on the number of times a keyword was mentioned or were actually curated portals, like Yahoo! that just sorted all the cool sites they knew about into categories.
This new BackRub search engine used an innovative new approach to finding pages ranked by relevancy. The search engine was renamed Google, and the algorithm it employed was named Page Rank.
Sergey Brin was excited by the idea and partnered with Page to develop the new engine. The project got so big that it started bringing Stanford’s network to its knees. Page and Brin were persuaded to drop out of grad school and try launching Google as a startup. (Google is a name that comes as a play on the word “googol,” which is a number represented by a one followed by a hundred zeros.)
The Web domain www.google.com was registered in 1997, but Google officially opened for business in September 1998.
The Google Doodle has become a regular event, where the search engine will change the logo on its homepage to celebrate holidays and the anniversaries of famous people and events. This is the story behind that tradition.
The company, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, traditionally marks its birthday on the Google homepage on September 27. Google is celebrating its 19th birthday on Wednesday(27 September 2017) with an animated Doodle shown to web browsers around the world.
The internet giant is marking the milestone by inviting users of its search engine to “explore 19 surprises we’ve launched over the past 19 years” when you click on the Doodle. Included in the feature is a version of the classic game snake.
However, not even Google seems to really know when it was formed. Since 2006, Google has celebrated its birthday on September 27, but the year before that had it as September 26. In 2004, its 6th birthday Doodle went online on September 7, and in the year before that, it was September 8.
In fact, none of these dates seem to have any particular relevance.
The company’s own history lists its incorporation date in 1998 – the nearest thing to a corporate birthday – as September 4. And the idea for Google began years earlier in 1996, as a research project at Stanford University, when Page and Brin had a new idea for a search engine that would rank pages by how many other sites linked to it, rather than the crude format others used at the time – ranking them by how often the search term appeared on the page.
Google alluded to confusion over its birthday in 2013, admitting it had celebrated its birthday on four different dates, but September 27 now seems to have stuck. The company may have just chosen the date because it was the first birthday Doodle in 2002 used.
In the year 2016, the company split under a new corporate umbrella, Alphabet, which hived off more outlandish divisions of the company such as its driver-less cars unit and robotics subsidiary Boston Dynamics. The change saw its founders move away from Google’s day-to-day running.
18 years after it was founded at Stanford University, Google is one of the world’s most powerful companies. It is second only to Apple in value, with a market capitalization of $541 billion (£417 billion).
Larry Page and  Sergey Brin are ranked 12th and 13th on Forbes’ list of the richest people in the world, with net worth of $35.2 billion and $34.4 billion respectively.
Proceed here to see googles Google’s 19th Birthday doodle
So there you have it! Happy birthday, Google!