Google celebrates its 22nd birthday, together but at a distance

Google celebrates the 22nd Sunday of its existence with an animated Birthday Doodle.

The Doodle shows G from Google celebrating with his colleagues at Google with cake and gifts at an online video conference party. The virtual party reminds us that in the time of the coronavirus it is important to maintain social distancing, even on special occasions.

The company was founded approximately 22 years ago when Stanford Ph.D. Students and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page published an article called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertext Web Search Engine. In it, the couple described 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 described their vision for a search engine, the company has grown dramatically. Google’s search engine now indexes hundreds of billions of web pages, but the company has gone from its 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 life extension.

But her date of birth is actually a bit hazy. The company has celebrated its birthday on September 27 since 2006, but the previous year it celebrated its birthday on September 26, and in 2004 and 2003, the date was September 7 and 8, respectively. Google isn’t even sure why this is the case, especially since it was incorporated on September 4, 1998.