Search engine —and “place you go to remember things you already knew but no longer have to remember”— Google celebrates its thirteenth birthday today! And to think it all began with a relatively modest $100,000 investment.
On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation as Google Inc. – they had received a $100,000 check from an investor made out to Google, Inc., and needed to incorporate that name so they could legally deposit the check.
Prior to the launch, Page and Brin met at Stanford in 1995, and soon decided to launch a search service called BackRub in January 1996. They soon reevaluated the name (and the creepy logo) in favor of Google, a play on the mathematical figure, “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The name embodied their mission to create an infinite amount of web resources. And that they did.
So happy birthday, Google. If it weren’t for you, I would never have known that sometimes when you try searching for The Divinyls song “I Touch Myself” you get “I Touch Me Myself” for some reason, or the name of the guy on that TV show who I know I’ve seen in something else, or if my symptoms mean that I’m pregnant even though I know I’m not.
Let’s just hope this isn’t the year Google gets its tongue pierced and starts acting out. I really don’t want to know what that homepage would look like.
Happy Birthday Google: Making Sense of the Web for 13 Years [Mashable]