Google 21

Google celebrated its 21st birthday with an adorable and special doodle today. The search engine was founded by two Stanford Ph.D. students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, 21 years ago in September 1998.

Larry and Sergey invented Google in their dormitories at Stanford in California. The two had published a paper about launching a prototype of a large-scale search engine.

Before discovering Google, the two had also developed a search algorithm known as Backrub’. However, the two zeroed in on the name Google for their project because it resembled with the name googol which is a mathematical term meaning 10 raised to the power of 100.

In fact they wrote about this in their paper too, "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."

For its twenty first anniversary, the search engine celebrated with a cartoon of a throwback photo of a bulky computer, which shows a Google search screen, lying on the side on a table with the timestamp of ’98 9 27 written on the right hand corner of the image.

Though the search engine celebrates its birth anniversary today, September 27 was not always its official birthday. Until 2005 the website celebrated its birthday on September 7. But since 2005, it has marked its birthday on September 8, September 26 and, recently, September 27.