September 267, 2017: Google is celebrating its 19th birthday today and the company has marked the occasion with an epic new doodle.
The spinning wheel occupying the most famous website on the planet serves up one of 19 different surprises when you click on it. Each one represents a year of the company’s history.
“In 1997, one of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page, had just arrived at Stanford University to pursue his P.h.D in computer science,” reminisces the company on its official page.
Of all the students on campus, Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, was randomly assigned to show Page around. This chance encounter was the happy surprise that started it all. From there, the two came together with a common goal in mind: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, a mantra that would go on to become Google’s mission statement. The two hunkered down in a garage – Google’s first office – and got to work.
The search giant currently serves 4.6 billion users across 160 countries – who are searching for things in 123 different languages.
It regularly posts doodles to the homepage, which serve to mark a special occasion – usually the anniversary of a birth, invention or event.
Over the last 19 years Google has grown to become one of the biggest technology companies in the world and has moved far beyond just providing search results.
As well as producing its own hardware and software it has stretched into research and development around future technologies like self-driving cars.
