Google is officially celebrating its 18th birthday with a new animated Google Doodle on the homepage, showing theGoogle ‘G’ inflating a balloon and twisting it into the full name of the company, before flying off. Or is it? Since, if you click (or tap, if you are on mobile) the logo, you will see results for the search query “when is google’s birthday”, so it looks like the search giant wants to spread some confusion itself.
Last year, Google celebrated the 18th anniversary of the registration of the domain google.com, which is actually a full year older than the company, but there is actually a little bit of confusion about when is Google’s birthday.
Insofar as a company can be ‘born’, Google filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, in California. The company got its start thanks to Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who invested $100,000, and Google’s bank account was created in the same month to be able to deposit the cheque. However, for the last ten years now, the company’s doodles have been celebrating September 27 as Google’s birthday. Confusing matters further, this wasn’t always the case. In 2004, the birthday was celebrated on September 7 instead and Google celebrated its fifth birthday on September 8, 2003.
Regardless, Google is definitely 18 years old at this point – not old enough to get a drink in many parts of the world, but old enough to drive in most places. Maybe we’ll get to see those self-driving cars this year, now that Google can get a license.
Google is also holding an event today in India. The Google for India event brings together much of Google’s top leadership here, to discuss how technology can change lives, and to share Google’s vision for India. Global leaders who will be present at the event include John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Engineering and the man who heads Google Search, Amit Fulay, Group Product Manager of Communications which includes Google’s new messaging efforts Allo and Duo, Joanna Wright, Vice President of Product Management at YouTube, and several other Google executives.
We may not know when is Google’s birthday, but we will have more from Google executives all through this week, so stay tuned.