Culture 3 min read
testing / Shutterstock.com

testing / Shutterstock.com

Google is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a quirky doodle and some cool easter eggs.

First off, Happy Birthday Google, I want to thank you for every question I’ve ever asked you, no matter how strange, obscure, or confusing it might have been.

If you’ve set Google as your default homepage like me, you may have noticed the fun Doodle the company dedicated to itself yesterday.

1998 was not only the year of the birth of Google, but also a year that marked a turning point for the Internet and new tech.

The world could’ve been a different place had Sergey Brin and Larry Page found a buyer for Google.

Happy Birthday Google!

In late 1999, Page and Brin wanted to sell their startup to fund their studies at Stanford, and shopped around their yet-to-be-patented PageRank system, or the spirit of Google’s search engine back then.

Excite, once a major internet portal and one of the earliest search engines, declined to buy Google for $750,000. Yahoo! also rejected the offer.

Google’s founding duo must be grateful to Excite and Yahoo because they passed on the deal.

Today, Alphabet Inc., Google parent company, boasts a market cap of over $835 billion, and it’s likely to be the third company in history to hit a $1 trillion valuation, an exclusive club currently having only two members, Apple and Amazon.

Google celebrates its birthday every September 27, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, so Google is celebrating with humor and some throwbacks to the 90s.

“Twenty (ish 😉) years ago, two Stanford Ph.D. students launched a new search engine with a bold mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Though much has changed in the intervening years—including now offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries—Google is still dedicated to building products for everyone,” said Google, “Today’s video Doodle takes a stroll down memory lane by exploring popular searches all over the world throughout the last two decades”.

The wink alludes to the fact that Google didn’t seem to settle on a firm birthday as it has celebrated it on a different date over the years, but we can safely say that it’ll be sticking with September 27.

Check out Google 20th birthday doodle and join us below for more fun:

Easter Eggs (No Spoilers!)

Google engineers and programmers have hidden many virtual easter eggs and in-jokes in the search engine, Google Maps, and Google Calculator and we’ve gathered for you some fun ones:

All you need to unlock them is to type in these queries (or just click on the links):

do a barrel roll

Askew

zerg rush

define anagram

the answer to life the universe and everything

once in a blue moon

Ask for directions in Maps: The Shire To Mordor, China To Japan.

Others have joined in the Google fun:

In 20 years, Google has come a long way. It has accomplished so many significant achievements, and it might’ve been just warming up as it has some amazing plans for the future, be it in AI, quantum computing, robots, drones, and other cutting-edge tech.

So, once again, Happy Birthday Google, may your easter eggs be plentiful and your searches never-ending.

Is Google worth wishing a happy birthday to?

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Zayan Guedim

Trilingual poet, investigative journalist, and novelist. Zed loves tackling the big existential questions and all-things quantum.

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