Happy birthday, Google! Google celebrates its 21st birthday today, and the tech giant took us way back with a throwback picture of a bulky computer. The retro doodle showed a system monitor featuring Google’s search screen. It also showcased a timestamp dated to September 27, 1998.

 

The birthday doodle is an epic throwback to what a typical desktop computer looked like 21 years ago when Google was founded.

 

Now one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world, the tech giant began as a project by two Stanford Ph.D. Computer graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in their dorm room.

 

The two co-founders published a paper called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. In it, the pair outlined Google, a prototype “large-scale search engine” that had a database of “at least 24 million pages.”

 

“We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100, and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines,” the pair wrote in the paper’s introduction. They initially named it Backrub — imagine that!

 

The search engine portal went through a number of developments to become what it is today.

 

 

A few years later, a company named Sun Microsystems funded Backrub. This move helped Google Inc. to become a legal entity with its first office in California.

 

In 2001, Google received a patent for its technology, and Page was listed as its investor. After this, the company went public. Over the years, Google released products like Google Docs, Gmail, Google Drive and one of the most popular web browsers named Google Chrome.

 

In the coming years, Google also acquired video streaming platform YouTube and forayed in the smartphone, smart speaker and mobile computer hardware sectors with the Pixel phones, Google Home and Chromebook.

 

With 2015 came corporate restructuring, and that saw Alphabet Inc become Google’s parent company. Together, the two are one of the world’s largest conglomerates.

 

Currently, Google’s estimated net worth is around $300 billion. Its parent company, Alphabet, is worth approximately $900 billion. Together, the two are worth more than Amazon and Apple.

 

In the 21 years since Brin and Page outlined their vision for a search engine, the company has grown up dramatically. With over 60,000 employees in 50 countries, Google makes and contributes to hundreds of products that are used by billions globally. Also, Google’s search engine now indexes hundreds of billions of webpages.

 

At least we can celebrate with a boozy drink or two because Google is now old enough to drink.