There is a good chance you have come across a ‘doodle’ (little graphics or animations around the search bar on Google.com commemorating anniversaries) by the premier search engine Google. You may have even seen one which celebrates the company’s birthday. If you did come across that one, such as this one celebrating Google’s 25th anniversary, you did so on 27 September.
Given that, it would be reasonable for you to assume that Google went live on 27 September. However, that is not the case.
The now world-famous Google.com domain was registered on 15 September 1997—the first day in history when someone was able ‘to google something’, as the company name has now become an eponymous verb used in common parlance. That somebody, however, had to be a person associated with the research project led by Sergey Brin and Larry Page that created the search engine, as the website did not become accessible to the public until early 1998.
Also in 1998, Google was officially incorporated as a company. The date of the company’s incorporation was also in September, on the 4th. A lot of major milestones for Google have happened in September—so why are they celebrating their birthday on the 27th?
It is a symbolic decision, made by the company leadership in 2005. That year, on 27 September, tech journalist John Battelle announced that Google had indexed a record number of web pages, around 24 billion, beating its closest competitor at the time, the MSN search engine. The company has been celebrating its birthday on 27 September ever since.
Google has gone on to achieve many other major milestones. In May 2011, it reached one billion monthly active users, the first website to ever do so. In January 2020, its since-founded parent company Alphabet Inc became the fourth company in the world to hit a trillion-dollar market cap—its current market cap is just under $3 trillion.
The two founders, who started the idea as a research project for their doctoral thesis at Stanford University, are now both centibillionaires. Sergey Brin’s net worth is around $190 billion, while Larry Page’s net worth is around $205 billion. Whether they celebrate the birthday of their company on 4, 15, or 27 September does not really matter—they certainly made every September moment of the project count.
Related articles:
