When Is Google’s Birthday?
If you have ever sat in front of a computer, it’s more than likely you have made your way over to google.com. And for our Digital Marketing school, it is almost certain that our students have spent countless hours on the Google search engine results page (SERPs). If you’ve ever researched your favorite musician, actor, looked up what certain illness symptoms could mean, or searching for help working out a homework problem, you have undoubtedly spent time clicking through Google’s numerous web pages and links to articles.
If you don’t want to read the entire history, the short answer is that Google recognizes its birthday as September 27th of 1998.
What Is Special About September 27?
For those of you who love the organization and don’t already know, here’s a rather exciting announcement:
September 27, 2017, will mark the 19th anniversary of Google’s creation! Every year, Google celebrates its birthday with a celebratory doodle on its homepage! While there has been some debate over the exact date of the company’s founding, September 27th has generally been accepted as the official birthday.
What Day Was Google Born?
There’s always been a lot of confusion surrounding the official date of Google’s creation. According to independent.co.uk, throughout the month of September, there are a number of dates marking important moments in the company’s history. The domain of google.com was first established on September 15th, the website received its first payment of $100,000 in August of 1998 and filed for incorporation in California that September, which allowed the company to have a bank account in which to deposit that check; even the organization’s first official workspace and hiring of their first employee occurred in September. As Independent.co.uk’s Andrew Griffin speculates, it just might be possible that Google has become too big to be confined to merely one birth date.
Although we have all spent copious amounts of time on Google, how many of us really know the company’s history? Have you ever really thought about taking the time to conduct a Google search on Google’s own history? It’s quite a bizarre undertaking when you stop to think about it. If you never thought about the search engine’s history or the brilliant minds behind the colorful homepage graphic, let’s take a few moments to learn a little bit about our favorite website!
A Brief History:
In 1995, Larry Page was in the midst of considering attending graduate school at Stanford University. While visiting the school, Page was assigned to a second-year graduate student, Sergey Brin, to be given a tour of the campus. According to lifewire.com Page and Brin were not fast friends, they found each other a bit obnoxious and difficult to deal with; however, despite a bumpy start, they soon “debated each other into friendship and partnership.”
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By 1996, Page began working on a search engine for his doctoral thesis that would “rank search results based loosely on the idea of ‘citation.” Page’s project, originally called BackRub, would become the prototype for Google.com. After collaborating with Brin on this project, Page soon began to realize that BackRub could easily become a consumer search engine. Unlike other engines, which produced results based on how many times the searched keyword occurred in the article or on the webpage, Page and Brin’s engine filtered search results by relevancy. Once they realized what they had on their hands, Page and Brin dropped out of college to attempt to launch their project as a start-up.
September of 1997 saw the project renamed Google – a play on the word googol which is a number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeros—and www.google.com registered as the official domain.
By 1998, Google was open for business. Although the official anniversary date for Google.com is speculated to be September 7th, the celebration of its anniversary shifts around every year, possibly due to the World Trade Center bombing occurring only a few years after Google’s launch on nearly the same date. Only recently has September 27th seemed to be accepted as the official anniversary.
In 2015, it had become apparent that Google enterprises had begun to expand to more than merely a search engine and internet products. The corporation began to invest in projects like Google Glass, driverless cars, high-speed internet and home gadgets, products that would take years to research and even longer to make any profit. These changes in products began to worry investors who were concerned that making such high-risk changes would not pay off in the end. Thus, we saw the creation of the Alphabet.
Alphabet
With concerns about product changes rising with every new venture, Page and Brin decided to create a new corporate structure. According to the article Google and Alphabet: What does this all mean? making this change would transform Google from a “company that does a huge range of things, to a conglomerate that owns a string of businesses.” The new parent company, “Alphabet,” was created to take over Google’s more ambitious projects, such as Life Sciences division Calico, Google X, Google Fiber and much more. Larry Page left his second in command, Sunda Pichai, in charge of “new Google”-which oversaw core businesses such as Gmail, YouTube and Android-and set out to run Alphabet himself. This development allowed Page and Brin to step back from Google’s everyday responsibilities and focus on developing more of their bigger ideas and aspirations for the company.
Since Google’s founding and its launch, it has become one of the most powerful companies in the world. There isn’t a student, parent, business owner, child or grandparent that hasn’t used or, at the very least, heard of – the corporation. Google’s growth and its recent split into Google and Alphabet allow Page and Brin to continue to work towards bigger aspirations for the company, ranging from scientific advances to creating fun household products. As of 2015, according to Business Insider Page’s net worth was estimated at roughly $35.7 billion with Brin coming up close behind as being worth a whopping $35 billion. As of May 2017, Google itself has been estimated to be worth roughly $101.8 billion.
In addition to the well know search engine, the company has launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011 among a number of other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company, Alphabet Inc.
The company has achieved a mind-blowing amount of success in just 19 (though the number of years may vary depending on the date you may personally consider to be Google’s birthday) short years. Take a brief moment to think about just how different life would be if Page and Brin hadn’t taken to each other after that tour of Stanford in 1995. Wish Google a happy birthday on September 27th and keep in mind just how much success you’re surrounded by the next time you do a quick Google search!
*In no way does Fremont University promise or guarantee employment or level of income/wages.
