Google turns 23: A look at its birth, founding members & an Indian American CEO at the helm

New Delhi : Search engine giant Google has turned 23 years old on Monday.

Marking the special occasion, the company unveiled a special cake-themed doodle on its homepage. The animated doodle features a cake with “23” written on top of it, with a birthday candle indicating “L” in “Google”.

On the momentous pretext, here are some interesting facts on most popular search engine around the globe :  

Google’s Birth

In September 1998, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as part of a PhD project. A blog by Google read, “It’s said that one chance encounter can change the course of your life. In Google’s case, a chance encounter between two computer scientists changed the course of the Internet and the lives of millions.”

Founding Members 

In 1997, a graduate student at Stanford University, Sergey Brin, was coincidentally assigned to show the campus to Larry Page, who was considering to join Stanford for his graduation. By the next year, the two were developing a search engine together and its first prototype. In just a year of meeting each other, in 1998, Google Inc, was officially born.

Interestingly, Google was originally founded on September 4, 1998. According to reports, in 2005, the company changed the birth date to September 27 to make it coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that the search engine was indexing.

When Sundar Pichai took over as Google CEO

In December 2019, Page and Brin announced that they were stepping down from their respective posts in the Alphabet and Google, as the company did not need a President and two CEOs anymore. They further announced that Sundar Pichai would be the new CEO of both – Alphabet and Google.

Pichai has been at Google since 2004, rising through various ranks to eventually leading the entire company.

Notably, as post on the official Google Doodle blog read, “Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same. Happy 23rd Birthday, Google”.