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Published 16:53 IST, September 27th 2020

Google celebrates 22nd Birthday with creative doodle animation

It was in September 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin found the world’s most-visited Internet search engine Google

Reported by: Zaini Majeed
null | Image: self

On its 22nd birthday, Google launched a special Doodle that depicts a cheerful birthday ‘G’ donning a birthday cap while browsing online and surrounded with gift packs and a birthday cake. The animated Google doodle commemorates the day when students Larry Page and Sergey Brin designed the world’s most-visited Internet search engine while they were still under graduate students at California’s Stanford University. The American search engine, therefore, dedicates an eye-catching doodle that marks the day Google incorporated itself on papers. In the past, Google celebrated its birthday on September 8, 7, and September 26 respectively, but in 2020, the birthday doodle appears on the 27 of this month. 

“There’re some differing opinions about when to bust out the candles and cake, one fun fact is that our first doodle was posted even before Google was officially incorporated,” Ryan Germick, Doodle Team Lead had said about Google’s birthday in an update earlier.

[Google's 22nd birthday doodle. Credit: Google]

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“With a company that’s got fun as deeply embedded in its DNA as Google, it seems fitting that any function would be a real bash if you will,” Germick said. Interestingly, Google Doodle describes how the company initially picked a mathematical term Googol for a name, then later changed it to Google after  Page and Brin set up headquarters in an office park in Mountain View. 

“The world-famous moniker (Google) is a play on a mathematical term that arose out of an unassuming stroll around the year 1920,” the American Multinational Company wrote in the animation description.

It further continued, that an American mathematician Edward Kasner asked his young nephew Milton Sirotta to help him choose a name for a mind-boggling number: a 1 followed by 100 zeros. “Milton’s reply? A googol,” the company revealed.

Term added to Oxford Dictionary in 2006

Google said that by early 1950, the term had gained widespread visibility and even appeared in a popular book Mathematics and the Imagination authored by American mathematicians Edward Kasner and James R. Newman. According to an early TIME report it was in June of 2000 that Google attained a hallmark of one billion Internet URLs and became the number one search engine on the Web. By 2004 it turned to the world’s most-visited Web sites indexing 138,000 search queries per minute. While in 2006, “Google” was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb. Over the years, to celebrate the birth of the most popular search engine, Google has released many creative doodles listed below. 

[Google’s 13th Birthday doodle was on deck, with letters as characters at a birthday party. Credit: Google]

[On Google’s 15th Birthday, the Piñata games were played many billions of candies were won. Credit: Google]

[Doodle illustration of Google's 10th birthday. Credit: Google]

[Google's 19th birthday doodle illustration involved 19 surprises it launched over the past 19 years - including the brand new Search easter egg the Snake Game. On ing the doodle Google took users to a spin game and thanked them with a surprise for celebrating with the company. Credit: Google]

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Updated 16:53 IST, September 27th 2020

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