Google Celebrates 12th Birthday

Google doodle showing picture of a cake by Wayne Thiebaud, to celebrate Google's 12th birthday Photo: VAGA NY/GOOGLE

Google Doodle: 12th birthday cake for search engine

Summer 1995 Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford, when the 23-year-old Brin was assigned to show 24-year-old Page around the campus. They do not particularly hit it off, but Page joins the university as a computer science graduate student.

January 1996 Page and Brin, now both computer science graduate students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub which operates on Stanford servers for more than a year, eventually taking up too much bandwidth.
September 1997 Google.com is registered as a domain after the pair decide BackRub needs to be rebranded. The new name is a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. It is an early hint at their mission to organise a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
November 1997 The pair publish an early academic paper setting out Google's aims and specifications. It is called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of the erstwhile computer firm Sun Microsystems, becomes the first investor in Google when he writes a cheque for $100,000 to an entity that does not ye exist - a company called Google Inc.
The first review of Google by the search engine analyst Danny Sullivan on the website SearchEngineWatch.com notes “I think many people will be pleased” with their Google search results.
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