Google turns 23, celebrates birthday with homepage cake doodle

California: Global search engine Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday on Monday (September 27, 2021). The US technology company is celebrating the occasion with a special doodle on its homepage. 

Today’s Google doodle features a cake with “23” written on top of it, with a birthday candle substituting for “L” in "Google." Google was actually founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were Ph.D students at Stanford University in California, on September 4, 1998.

However, a year ahead of that, the two had actually started working on their search engine together in their dorm rooms with a very basic first prototype. Twenty-three years down the line, Google has today established itself as the world’s most powerful and comprehensive search engine.

The company, for the first seven years, observed its birth anniversary on September 4. However, later it decided to shift the celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that this search engine was indexing.

Google actually went public in 2004 and was reorganised as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. in 2015. The search engine, as of today, enables searches in more than 150 languages around the globe.

In their own words: "Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same."

The history of the doodle itself dates back to 1998, to a month before Google was founded. The very first doodle was on the long-running “Burning Man” event in Black Rock City, Nevada.

Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing its co-founder Larry Page. Page, in the meantime, took over the same position at Alphabet Inc. 

On December 3, 2019, Pichai became the CEO of Alphabet as well.

Happy Birthday, Google!