TQS StaffIt’s hard to believe that search engine giant Google, one of the biggest companies in the world, is only 14 years old. But back in September 1998 Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin set about to revolutionise the way we use the web. Their mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” with the unofficial slogan “Don’t be evil”.
The doodle (above, click for full size) is a birthday cake with 14 candles. As the cake gets eaten, the candles are removed to mark a tally of the company’s age.
Google got their name from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wanted to provide large quantities of information for people. And that they did. Google has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centers around the world,[14] and process over one billion search requestsand about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.(source)
The very first Google Doodle was drawn in the same year the company was founded. Larry and Sergey wanted to let users know they were attending The 1998 Burning Man festival so placed a stick figure behind the ‘o’ of ‘Google’ as a kind of out of office.
They probably didn’t think it would lead to the success and popularity of the Doodles we have today, but here we are talking about them 14 years on which leaves us only to say – Happy Birthday Google! Oh, and where’s our piece of cake?
By Jamie McHale
