Before
we do a search on Google, today you will notice balloons and celebrations – the
company is showing everyone a cute,
celebratory doodle on 27 September to mark the company’s coming-of-age. It
shows Google’s “G” blowing up a balloon to spell out the rest of its name – but
blowing it up too much, and being carried off into the sky. Welcome to adulthood, Google! The tech giant
is celebrating its 18th birthday with this festive, balloon-filled Doodle by artist
Gerben Steenks.
Google is
celebrating its birthday on September 27, and has done since 2006, but no one
quite knows why -- not even Google. In 2005, it celebrated its birthday on
September 26, and in 2004 and 2003 respectively, the date was September 7 and
September 8. However, the first Google
birthday Doodle in 2002, to celebrate the company's fourth birthday, went live on September 27. Yet there is
nothing in Google's history to indicate any of these dates are important. Larry
Page and Sergey Brin registered the Google domain on September 15, 1997, and
the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998.
Whatever it be in 18 years, Google has become one of the biggest
companies on the web, second only to Amazon. Google is now officially an adult. It is stated that 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. Last year, the company split under a new
corporate umbrella, Alphabet, which hived off more outlandish divisions of the
company such as its driverless 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 capitalisation of $541bn (£417bn). Page and Brin are ranked 12th and
13th on Forbes' list of the richest people in the world.
Some reports state
that Google is already feeling death
breathing down its neck – or is worried that it might. The company’s campus has
a huge model of a T-Rex skeleton, which is meant to remind employees not to let
the company go extinct. When Chrome
doesn’t have an internet connection, it will show a warning about not being
able to connect, alongside a picture of a little dinosaur. Independent.co.uk
adds that, if you press the space bar
when that’s showing, it will start a game where you run along as the dinosaur,
jumping over any obstacles by pressing the space bar again. The game will last
forever, because all of the obstacles are generated by the code.
Now to the goats at
the start. Google’s headquarters are big, and lots of it is green. So much of
it is grass that it would need a lot of lawnmowers – but Google has a novel way
around that. Instead of gas-powered machines, Google hires a load of goats to
clear the fields around its campus. They visit for about a week at a time, and
about 200 of them come to much up the Google grass.
If you had noticed
the spelling mistake in Googlle
– in Sept. 2009, the search giant's name
appeared with an extra letter "l" on its home page, a change that did
not escape the notice of the internet. Within hours of the new logo going live,
"why is google spelt wrong" and "why does google have two
ls" were two of the most popular search phrases on the web. It was to mark its 11th birthday !
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
27th Sept. 2016.
