KOLKATA : Search engine giant Google is celebrating its 22nd birthday on Sunday with a special doodle.
The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at California’s Stanford University.
As graduate students, the pair set out to improve the way people interacted with the wealth of information on the World Wide Web. In 1998, Google was born, and the rest is history.
The search engine is known to mark most events and observances, achievements with their doodle. The letters of the word are spun around to pay a tribute or depict someone. For Google’s birthday, the letter G is seen surfing on a laptop with the rest of the letters having fun on a larger adjacent screen. Not to miss, the details of the gift box and cake on the table.
The now world-famous moniker is a play on a mathematical term that arose out of an unassuming stroll around the year 1920.
While walking in the woods of New Jersey, American mathematician Edward Kasner asked his young nephew Milton Sirotta to help him choose a name for a mind-boggling number: a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton’s reply? A googol! The term gained widespread visibility twenty years later with its inclusion in a 1940 book Kasner co-authored called “Mathematics and the Imagination.”
In 2006, the word “Google” was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, so if you’d like to learn more about how big a googol really is, just Google it! Although initially overshadowed by rival search engines such as Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, Google has grown to become the world’s most popular website, with more than 63,000 searches made every second. (AGENCIES)
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