Google turns 21; celebrates birthday with a Doodle

Google is celebrating its 21st birthday today. The search engine giant created a Google Doodle on Friday to celebrate the day. The doodle shows a desktop computer from 1998 and the old Google home page. Twenty-one years ago, two Stanford  students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, published a paper about launching a prototype of a "large-scale search engine" that had a database of 24 million pages. "We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines," the students wrote. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Google operates in over 100 languages, and answers trillions of search queries from across the globe each year.

From 'BackRub' to Google:

Google was started as a project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and was initially named 'BackRub' in 1996. Later, on September 15, 1997, it was registered as Google.com.

Google is a play on the word 'googol', which is the number 1 followed by a hundred 0s. The significance of googol was that Page and Brin wanted to indicate that that's the amount of information Google could furnish.

In 1998, Larry launched a newsletter called 'Google Friends Newsletter' to inform people about the company. Later, in the same year, Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to Google--which was a non-existent company at that time. With this funding, Google officially was incorporated as a private company.

The very first look of Google page did not gain much interest among people. But the search engine giant's second doodle, the icon of the Burning Man festival became widely popular.. In 1999, Google moved its first office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. And after a few months, it raised its first round of venture capital funding in the form of a $25 million investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufileld and Byers and sequoia Capital.

In 2001, Google received a patent for its technology and Larry Page was listed as its inventor. Since then, the company has introduced a wide-range of products including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Chrome, Google Maps and so on.

Google first employee:

Craig Silverstein was Google's first employee who stayed in the company for more than 10 years.

Google and Alphabet:

During the company's restructuring in 2015, Alphabet Inc became the parent company of Google and Larry Page became the CEO and Brin its President.  During this period, Sunder Pichai was given the charge of Google CEO.

Interesting facts about Google:

1. Google was the first big tech company to offer free meals to employees.
2. On August 19, 2004, Google had its first initial public offering (IPO) priced at $85 per share.
3. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
4. There are around more than 2 million Google searches per second.
5. The old employees of Google are called 'Googlers' and newbies are called 'Nooglers'.
6. The first tweet of Google was "I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010", which translates to 'I'm Feeling lucky' in binary.