Google Marks Its 21st Birthday With a Doodle: All You Need to Know

Google is marking its own birthday today with a doodle. The doodle features a photo of a 90s' style computer with Google search page and date stamp for September 27, 1998, surrounded by confetti in Google colours. A smaller Google doodle with number 21 as candles, as a part of Google logo, shows on the search results page. The search giant was founded 21 years ago in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then students at Stanford University in California. September 27 is, however, not Google's actual birthday.

If you take the company's incorporation date as its birthday, then Google was born on September 4, 1998, however, the company never celebrated the day as its birthday, at least not in the form of a Google doodle. Google celebrated September 7 as its birthday in doodles until 2005, following which it switched to September 27.

Initially, the search engine was called “BackRub” and it was later renamed “Google”.

“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,” Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page wrote in 1998 in a paper published about launching a prototype of a “large-scale search engine.”

The company got its start thanks to Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim who invested $100,000; in June 1999, the company had raised a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Google moved to its Mountain View location in the same year, where it remains. In 2001, the company was granted a patent for its technology.

What started out as a Web search engine has since turned into a massive conglomerate that calls itself Alphabet and Google is a subsidiary company. Today, Google operates all over the world in over 100 languages, answering trillions of search queries each year.

“The relentless search for better answers continues to be at the core of everything we do,” Google writes on its Our Story page. “Today, with more than 60,000 employees in 50 different countries, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globe, from YouTube and Android to Smartbox and, of course, Google Search. Although we've ditched the Lego servers and added just a few more company dogs, our passion for building technology for everyone has stayed with us — from the dorm room, to the garage, and to this very day.