Google's birthday has shifted around over the years, but it currently
is celebrated on September 27th. The exact year of Google's "birth"
depends on how you measure it.
In the summer of 1995, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford.
Larry
Page was considering attending Stanford for grad school, and Sergey
Brin was the second-year grad student assigned to show him around. Larry
Page decided to attend Stanford.
Brin and Page were not instant friends - they actually each thought the other was "obnoxious,"
but they debated each other into friendship and partnership. The two
young grad students started collaborating on a new search engine project
together.
In January of 1996, the Google founders started working on a new search engine called BackRub.
Larry Page began the project as his doctoral thesis.
The idea was to crawl and rank search results based
loosely on the idea of "citation," which is mainly an academic
currency. In scholarly research, academics keep track of citation count
(who is citing your work) as a count of how authoritative your writing
is. This still holds true today, and Google Scholar will tell you your
citation count among other things. (Even though Google Scholar gives you
citation counts, most academics prefer using Web of Science when they have access.)
Larry
Page worked on this new BackRub search engine as a way to translate the
idea of citation count into the growing World Wide Web. In fact, the
idea to make it a "search engine" occurred after the project evolved.
Originally he was interested in graphing the
World Wide Web, and then both Page and Brin realized that this would
make a fantastic consumer search engine. Previously, search engines
either crawled based on the number of times a keyword was mentioned or
were actually curated portals, like Yahoo! that just sorted all the cool
sites they knew about into categories.
This new BackRub search engine used an innovative new approach to finding pages ranked by relevancy. The search engine was renamed Google, and the algorithm it employed was named PageRank.
Sergey Brin was excited by the idea and partnered with Page to develop
the new engine. The project got so big that it started bringing
Stanford's network to its knees.
Page and Brin were persuaded to
drop out of grad school and try launching Google as a startup. (Google
is a name that comes as a play on the word "googol," which is a number
represented by a one followed by a hundred zeros.)
Google Launches
The Web domain www.google.com was registered in 1997, but Google officially opened for business in September of 1998.
So we've got 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 as potential Google start dates.
Generally,
Google uses the1998 official Google business launch date to calculate
their age in years. By most accounts, the true day of the official
Google opening was September 7th, but Google has shifted the date
around, "depending on when people feel like having cake." Likely it was
the anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing that caused the date
to shift.
In recent years, the Google birthday is generally celebrated on September 27th.
Expect to see a Google doodle on that date. If you want to get an early
sneak peak of the celebratory Google, try looking at Google in a
country with an earlier time zone.
Here's another fun fact. If you
have registered for a Google Account, you'll see a personal birthday
cake doodle on your birthday.
By Marziah Karch
Google Expert
