Google is celebrating its birthday with an endearing doodle. The search engine giant turned 22 on Sunday. The doodle has an animated “G” wearing a birthday hat.
In 2006, the word “Google” was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, four years after it was chosen as the ‘most useful word’ by the American Dialect Society. It was added to the eleventh edition of the Merrian-Webster Collegiate Dictionary the same year.
Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. The duo together owns about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a California privately held company on September 4, 1998, in California. Google was then reincorporated in Delaware on October 22, 2002.
The partnership between Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin traces its roots to the sunny campus of Stanford University. As graduate students, the pair set out to improve the way people interacted with the wealth of information on the World Wide Web. In 1998, Google was born, and the rest is history.
The now world-famous moniker is a play on a mathematical term that arose out of an unassuming stroll around the year 1920. While walking in the woods of New Jersey, American mathematician Edward Kasner asked his young nephew Milton Sirotta to help him choose a name for a mind-boggling number: a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton’s reply? A googol! The term gained widespread visibility twenty years later with its inclusion in a 1940 book Kasner co-authored called “Mathematics and the Imagination.”
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