Google's birthday has shifted around over the years, but it currently is celebrated on September 27th. The exact year of Google's "birth" depends on how you measure it.In the summer of 1995, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford.
In January of 1996, the Google founders started working on a new search engine called BackRub.
This search engine used an innovative new approach to finding pages ranked by relevancy. The search engine was renamed Google, and the algorithm it employed was named PageRank.
The Web domain www.google.com was registered in 1997, but Google officially opened for business in September of 1998.
Generally, Google uses that 1998 date to calculate their age in years.By most accounts, the true day of the official Google opening was September 7th, but Google has shifted the date around, "depending on when people feel like having cake." [The link that originally contained that quote has since been moved or deleted by Google.] In recent years, people at Google feel like having cake on September 27th. Expect to see a Google doodle on that date. If you want to get an early sneak peak, try looking at Google in a country with an earlier time zone.
I was an idiot when I was 17. Okay, okay, scratch that, I’m still an idiot. But Google just turned 17. Today marks 17 years since Brin and Page founded the company. In that time it has gone from one of a clutch of search engines to a cultural force, to a corporation that cannot be erased from history. You can stick a pin in history and define human existence before and after Google. It has changed the way we think, the way we learn, the way we shop and the way we think about business. Its influence is hard to truly quantify.
I was 14 when Google was founded. I have lived my entire working life in the shadow of Google and the way its existence and mission to gobble up all of the world’s information has changed the business I chose – writing and journalism. I am a child of Google, like the rest of my generation. It’s easy to take the Dave Eggers view – as represented in his novel ‘The Circle’ – and consider Google as the manifestation of the dystopian corporate nightmare. It crawls into every corner, tries to change every business.
