Google turns 23, celebrates birthday with unique doodle

Google, is celebrating its 23rd birthday on Monday (today) with a special cake-themed doodle on its homepage.

The animated doodle features a cake with “23” written on top of it along a birthday candle substituting for “L” in "Google”.

Google's foundation started in the year 1997 and was officially established as a company on September 27, 1998.

Technically, the company was founded on September 4, 1998. Though the company, for the first seven years, observed its birth anniversary on the said date, that year, but later it was decided to shift the celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that this search engine was indexing.

Alphabet Inc. was created on October 2, 2015 through a restructuring of Google and later became its parent company and that of its former subsidiaries as well.

The history of the doodle itself dates back to 1998, to a month before Google was founded.

In 1997, Sergey Brin, a graduate student at Stanford University, just so happened to be assigned to show Larry Page, who was considering Stanford for graduate school at the time, around campus. By the next year, the two Google co-founders were building a search engine together in their dorm rooms and developing their first prototype.

Hence, in 1998, Google Inc. was officially born.

“Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same,” wrote Google in its statement.

Co-founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google is today the most widely-used search engine globally. Its current CEO is Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Page on October 24, 2015.