Google celebrates 22nd birthday, together but from a distance
The search giant marked the occasion with a social-distancing Doodle.
Google social-distance celebrates.
Google is marking its 22nd year in existence Sunday with an animated birthday Doodle.
The Doodle shows us Google's G celebrating with its oogle colleagues with cake and presents in an online video conference party. The virtual party reminds us that in the time of coronavirus, it's important to maintain social distancing, even on special occasions.
The company was founded roughly 22 years ago when Stanford Ph.D. students and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page published a paper called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. In it, the pair outlined Google, a prototype "large-scale search engine" that had a database of "at least 24 million pages."
In the 22 years since Brin and Page outlined their vision for a search engine, the company has grown up dramatically. Google's search engine now indexes hundreds of billions of webpages, but the company has gone from humble beginnings as a search engine to the most dominant force in advertising. Google now has a parent company, Alphabet, with tentacles that touch everything from self-driving cars to its Android mobile software to the extension of life.
But its birthdate is actually a bit murky. The company has celebrated its birthday on Sept. 27 since 2006, but the previous year, it celebrated its birthday on Sept. 26, and in 2004 and 2003, the date was Sept. 7 and Sept. 8, respectively. Google isn't even sure why this is, especially since it was incorporated on Sept. 4, 1998.
