Google Celebrates 25th Birthday

Twenty-five years ago today, Google, the multinational technology company that we all use regularly was launched. The company was founded on September 4, 1998, by two PhD students from Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Scott Hassan was the third member of the group who did most of the coding for the search engine in its building phase. However, he left the project before the official launch of Google and started his own company named Willow Garage in 2006. Google was officially launched on September 27, 1998.

Google was originally a research project of Page and Brin. All the search engines during that time ranked results based on the number of times the term being searched appeared on the webpage. The duo wanted to create a better search engine where other factors played a role in the ranking system such as the number and importance of the website pages. This was their unique idea behind creating Google. They named this algorithm PageRank. They shared their idea with Hassan who then went on to code for the same. 

When Google was originally created, it was named BackRub. The name Google comes from the rearrangement of letters from the word “googol” which denotes a huge number (1 followed by 100 zeros). This was to show that Google had tons of information to provide to users. 

To celebrate its 25th birthday, Google created a Google Doodle, where you can see the evolution of Google’s logo over the years. If you search “happy birthday” on the search engine today, confetti will rain down on your screen.