Happy Birthday Google!
Billions of people around the globe celebrate this search engine’s birthday by using the core search functions, YouTube or Google Map without realizing that it has ONLY been 12 years since the company even was founded!
It comes as a surprise that Google is officially (by means of today’s doodle) celebrating today, because previously the date of birth was set to around August 1998, when the famous $100,000 cheque from early investor Andy Bechtolsheim was received by Larry Page and Sergey Brin (and rumor has it that they did not know what to do with it because Google did not have a bank account).
Also, 4 September 4 1998 was named, because on that day the company was officially registered in Menlo Park.
Finally, the domain Google.com was registered on 15 September 1997 (which really makes Google a 13-year-old teenager – maybe they wanted to spare us those teenage pains?)
In any case, 1 internet-year equals 5 to 10 normal life years, so Google is now about 60 to 130 years old…
Which brings us to the point of why this site “Celebrities with Diseases” is writing about Google…. Well…
- Google certainly IS a celebrity (there are billions of “fans”, there is merchandise, there are many fan websites and business conferences only about Google.
- Like most 60 year olds, Google is showing (some) signs of obesity: there has never been more spam on Google´s ribs than now.
- The “heartbeat”, meaning the stock price has seen better times…
- One might hold that Google is showing signs of Schizophrenia as it still claims “Don’t be evil” to this very day while many in the business don’t really believe in that anymore, just ask the people at Tomtom.
Any other diseases you can think of?
Anyway – Google has significantly changed how we all work and live, and thus we are looking forward to the next exciting 12 years!
Happy Birthday! Please share the cake!
Just recently Google celebrates someone else’s birthday by dedicating it’s Doodle to one of Britain’s most famous writers, Mary Shelley.
Images: http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/sep-dec08/google10/cake.jpg