The world’s most popular search engine Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page September 27 in 1998 and now operates all over the world in hundreds of languages.
So on Google’s 21st birthday, here are five facts about the company that you didn’t know.
Google was originally named BackRub
Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborated on a ‘web crawler’ concept in 1996 which was called BackRub. It initially used Stanford’s servers for more than a year before chewing up too much bandwidth.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page met by chance
In 1995, when Page was 22, he wanted to attend Stanford University for his Ph.D. Brin, then 21 and already a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford was assigned with the task of showing Page around the campus.
Google’s first doodle was a Burning Man stick figure
The first ever Google doodle was a Burning Man stick figure that Page and Brin created in August 1998 to let people know that they were off to the Burning Man festival. Check out the doodle here.
The first Google office was a rented garage
Google’s first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki was Google’s first marketing manager and is now the CEO of YouTube.
Google’s New York office began at a Starbucks
Google kicked off its New York office in 2000 at a Starbucks coffee shop in New York City.
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