Today Google has marked it’s 18th birthday with a doodle of the “G” from Google blowing up a balloon and shaping it into the rest of their name, “oogle”. The G blows the balloon up a bit too much and begins to fly away before falling back to earth to start the GIF over again. So, happy birthday Google. But is it really Google’s birthday? Yes, no, kind of…
Firstly, there is the question of whether Google is actually 18 years old. It could actually be 19 years old. The Google.com domain name was first registered on September 15th in 1997, making Google 19 years old just under two weeks ago. It could also be argued that the true birth of the company was in Stanford in 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on a search engine called BackRub. Going by that date would make Google 20 years old this year.
On Google’s company history page they also list a date that would make perfect sense as their official company birthday, September 4th 1998. That is the date the Google became an incorporated company. For some reason they decided against using this date, but at least this birthday would still make the company 18 years old this month.
Back in 2013 when Google was celebrating their 15th birthday, even they had to admit that they didn’t really know what the correct date for their official anniversary should be. Previously Google has celebrated birthdays on many different days throughout September including the 7th, 8th, 26th and of course the 27th.
In 2005 however, Google took the 27th of September as their official birthday. They chose to use the huge milestone achievement announcement that their web search index was officially 1,000 times larger than when they had started less than a decade previously.
If you want to take some inspiration from Google, just remember that a business with a name like BackRub.com can grow into a company that’s worth about 500 billion dollars in less than 20 years and even the great minds at Google aren’t above changing their birthday to make themselves look younger. Happy birthday Google from everyone here at 3B1 Media & Marketing!