When Is Google's Birthday? When Does the Search Engine Celebrate its Birthday

Google’s birthday has shifted around for years but is celebrated on September 27, currently. The company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 traditionally marks its birthday on Google homepage on Google homepage on September 27. The exact year of Google’s “birth” depends on how you measure it.

When Is Google’s Birthday? It’s Complicated

In summer of 1995, Google’s founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Standford University.

Larry Page was attending Standford for Grad School, and Sergey Brin was second-year grad student assigned to show him around, Larry Page decided to attend Stanford.

Brin and Page did not become friends quickly – they started sharing their thoughts on science and technology, and it turned into friendship and partnership later on. The young students began collaborating on search engine project together.

Back in January 1996, both started working on a search engine called BackRub.

Larry Page began the project as his doctoral thesis. The idea was to rank pages by “citation,” In scholarly research, academics keep track of citation it is information about a reference to someone’s work which informs how authoritative someone’s work is. Now it is Google Scholar which still count some citation for search results.

Larry Page worked on his Idea of BackRub search engine to bring the idea of citation count into growing World Wide Web.

In fact, the idea to make it a “search engine” occurred after project evolved. Originally he was interested in graphing WWW later on both Larry and Sergey realized this would be a fantastic search engine for consumers. Previously search engine either crawled based on the number of times a keyword is present in an article, now it is changed they are 100s of the algorithm which test and rank pages.

The BackRub used an innovative approach to finding page ranked by relevancy. This search engine later renamed as Google, and algorithm it employed was named Pagerank. Sergey Brin was excited about Idea and him partnered with Larry to work on this search engine design. The project got so big that it started bringing Standford’s network to its knees.

Page and Brin were persuaded to drop out of grad school and launch Google as a startup (Google is a name that comes as a play on the word “googol,” which is a number represented by a one followed by a hundred zeros).

When did Google Launch?

The TLD google.com registered in 1997 but officially opened for business in September 1998. So we’ve Got 1995 to 1998 as potential launch dates.

Google uses 1998 as official Google launch date to calculate their age in years. But most accounts exact day of official Google opening was September 7th, but the company has shifted dates around.