Google turned 14 Thursday and celebrated its birthday with a doodle of a rich chocolate cake. Google was inscribed across the cake and seconds after opening the site, the 14 candles atop the delicacy get extinguished. A click on the doodle displayed a list of Google products.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 30,000 employees worldwide.
Time Magazine reported that Page and Brin met at Stanford University in 1995. By 1996, they had built a search engine (initially called BackRub) that used links to determine the importance of individual webpages. And the rest is history.
Some highlights from the timeline of events leading up to the September 27, 1998 launch:
In 1995, Larry Page visits Stanford. He has graduated from the University of Michigan and is considering Stanford for grad school. As fate would have it, Sergey Brin is his campus tour guide. “According to some accounts, they disagree about almost everything during this first meeting,” says Google.
By 1996, Page and Brin are both grad students and they’re collaborating on a search engine called “BackRub” It includes links to Brin and Page’s homepages as they appeared on Stanford’s servers.
In 1997, Page and Brin decide to rename BackRub to something else. “Google” is born. It’s “a play on the word ‘googol,’ a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web,” says Google.
Can you imagine if they kept the original name? “Let me BackRub that real quick.”
By 1998, Google is building up steam. In August, “Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000″ so Page and Brin can get down to business. The check is written to “Google, Inc.” but Page and Brin don’t officially incorporate until early September. They then open a bank account so they can deposit the check.
Page and Brin begin working out of Susan Wojcicki’s garage in September as well. Today, Wojcicki is the Senior Vice President of Advertising at Google. After the check clears, presumably, Craig Silverstein – a computer science grad student Page and Brin know from Stanford — is hired as Google’s first employee. And though there’s no mention of it in the company timeline, Google apparently becomes officially official on September 27, 1998.
