The search and tech giant Google is celebrating its 18th birthday. On September 27th, 2016, its page is showing an animated balloon-filled doodle to celebrate its officially matured age.
The company was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D friends that first met in the summer of 1995.
Going forward, Google has become one of the most visited and most widely used service on the web.
It gathered, and is still gathering information from practically anything inside the World Wide Web. With so much data, we may think that "Google knows everything". But that isn't the fact, at least when it comes to its birthday.
Google itself is confused of the exact real date. Since 2006, it has celebrated its birthday on every September 27th, but the year before that, it was September 26th.
And as for this year, Google is having at least six 18th birthday.
As a search engine that literally crawls and indexes everything in its path, it's very much versatile and resourceful. It's well-informed and could be one of the digital beings in the world that has most data. But still, it has a hard time picking one birthday date.
The strange coincidence just happens to the most informative company on the internet.
The Many Birthdays To Celebrate
While Google traditionally marks its birthday on September 27th, there are a lot of dates to consider by the tech giant.
As a start, the idea to create Google began as early as the year 1996, as a research project at Stanford University. It was aimed to be a search engine that would rank pages by how many other sites linked to it, and ranking them by how often the search term appeared on the page.
To make that idea happen, Google's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996. That time, Google didn't have a domain name yet. September 15th, 1997 was the date it registered google.com.
The company was given its first investment of $100,000 in August 1998 - addressed to Google, Inc., a name that didn't exist at the time. Later on, Google was incorporated, made itself official and created a bank account, and that was on September 4th, 1998. Included in September was its first office establishment and hiring its first ever employee.
Celebrating birthdays using doodles aren't the first time for the company. Its doodles have been celebrating (announcing) Google's birthdays on every year since September 27th, 2002. However, the first Google doodle was made in October 1998, and that was actually before the company was technically founded.
In 2003, Google moved to Mountain View. Here the company finally made its headquarter and called it Googleplex. The building complex was leased until Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million in 2006.
With so many dates, Google seems to be confused. It was in 2013 that the company admitted that it didn't really know when its real birthday date was. "When’s Google’s birthday? I'm not sure even we know," said Ryan Germick, Doodle Team Lead.
That time, the company also admitted that it has celebrated birthdays in September: the 7th, 8th, 26th and 27th. Google stick to the latter when it was celebrated for the first time in 2002. But on later years, the date again changed.
One of its potential birthdays was in 1995. If that is true, Google wouldn't be even 18 at all.
Google has plenty of dates to consider. With at least six days that are celebrated as Google's birthday, none of them are any more meaningful that the other.
So there we have it: the internet company with market capitalization worth $541 billion and revenue closing to $100 billion, has no idea when it was born.