Google is legal Well to buy a beer anyway. While the legality of some of its other activities is a point of contention among certain state and federal entities the web giant is Google celebrating its 21st birthday on Friday with a retro Doodle.
The Doodle shows you what a typical desktop computer looked like 21 years ago when Stanford Ph.D. students and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page published a paper called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. In it, the pair outlined Google, a prototype “large-scale search engine” that had a database of “at least 24 million pages.”
The doodle also has a timestamp dating back to 27 September 1998 the day the search giant was established by Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol or 10100, and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines,” the pair wrote in the paper’s introduction.
In the 21 years since Brin and Page outlined their vision for a search engine, the company has grown up dramatically. Google’s search engine now indexes hundreds of billions of webpages, but the company has gone from humble beginnings as a search engine to the most dominant force in advertising. Google now has a parent company, Alphabet, with tentacles that touch everything from self-driving cars to its Android mobile software to the extension of life.