It feels like we had Google throughout our entire lives. Well, at least the millennials have. We do not even know the trouble of going through life without this blessed search engine. The company just celebrated its 19th birthday yesterday, and they did not celebrate it alone. The party went right outside Google and reached all of its users in the form of a brilliant Google Doodle that packed in many games from older Doodles.
Do you know which one was the most loved and addictive game in the Google Doodles? Yes, the PacMan that got into a Doodle in 2010. They even used the game as an April fool this year. These games are not harmless at all, right? According to RescueTime, the software company, each Google Doodle can cost economies $120 million plus 4.8 million hours in lost productivity.
Google just shot out, not one but nineteen of these destructive Doodle games. To be very honest, we all love them. They don’t go away with the Doodle either. You can access the older ones here.
Google was born long after Larry Page got into Stanford in 1997 to pursue his Ph.D. in computer science. The person assigned to show Page around the campus was Sergey Brin. After a year, the two of them together founded Google that came out to be the most popular company in the world.
After this meeting, the two of them went on to create two different kinds of search engines. They found a way to rank results based on relevance rather than their frequency of occurrence. In an interview with UC Berkley News, Brin said,
“We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important.”
They used a lot of backlinks to determine a site’s rank and thus xnamed their product as “BackRub.” Soon after, they opted to use “googol” (the number 1 with 100 zeros following it) as the name. The name was meant to represent the infinite information the search engine would provide.
We may not have observed the next 19 years that followed. However, through this time, the world Google has become a verb that is used as a synonym of internet surfing. Google did not only limit itself to the search engine, but various other projects were launched as well. The Doodles represent the artsy side of the otherwise purely tech company. They went on to work on ventures as glorious as driverless cars, artificial intelligence, and neural networks.
