Have you already logged into Google today? If so, you've probably already seen her festive logo celebrating her 25th birthday. If not, you can see the logo below. But beyond the logo change, what else to know about the company that started in Suzanne Wojcicki's driveway, which later became the sister-in-law of the company's founder and CEO of YouTube – and she too (the parking lot, not Susan) can be seen later in the article. We used ChatGPT and Forefront to gather the information.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google (now called Alphabet), first met while studying at Stanford in 1996. They came up with an idea for a new search engine to compete with Altavista (for the younger ones – it's a bit like Yahoo search, only in yellow). Its first name was BackRub ("back scratching"), due to the fact that, unlike Altvista and other search engines at the time, it ranked search results according to an analysis of links between sites, so that sites that receive more links than other sites would be considered "quality" and would appear first in search results.
At first, they worked on the development in the university dormitories, but soon rented Wojcicki's garage, which lives nearby, in the town of Menlo Park, and you can virtually tour it inside Google Maps:
Google's birthday celebration date has changed several times over the years, probably due to the fact that, as a company, its "beginning" can be defined in different ways: google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997 (i.e. 26 years ago, not 25); The company's registration date was September 4, 1998, but the company never celebrated it; Until 2005, it celebrated in the days that followed, and in the year in question it set the 27th, thanks to the announcement that it had crossed the 25 billion pages in the search index and a significant change to the ranking algorithm.
Doodle all Google logos in honor of her 25th birthday, photo: Google
As early as 1998, Google began celebrating special occasions with the Doodle replacing its regular logo. Today there are more than 5,000 of them, and not all surfers get exposure to them; For example, at the beginning of last week, no less than 6 different doodles were presented in 6 countries, in honor of the Independence Leaves of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, while at the same time in the United States a doodle was presented in honor of labor rights activist Luisa Moreno.
Of course, the search engine did not remain Google's only product for long. She quickly realized that without advertisements she could not exist, and instead of the banners that were customary at the time (i.e., rectangular color pictures, as a kind of billboards in digital format), she appeared in the first results for a fee. It even acquired a company that specialized in adjusting advertisements so that each surfer would be presented with different advertisements not only according to the current search but also previous searches, and became a superpower in the advertising world (so much so that recently several countries have asked to force it to turn the advertising division into a separate company). She then acquired YouTube, which also became an unrivaled monster. Many other services, such as Gmail and Google Maps, are considered the default that every person connected to the network uses regularly.
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