Google has officially entered its teenage years, celebrating its 13th birthday today.
The search giant was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, after changing the name of its initial search engine BackRub to Google. It was named after “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
They set up a workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in California, who is now the senior vice president for advertising at Google.
Google filed for incorporation in California in 4 September of 1998, though the company officially celebrates its birthday on 27 September.
Eric Schmidt arrived in March of 2001 as its chairman of the board, before becoming CEO in August of that year. Page became CEO of the company earlier this year.
Google moved offices a few times to support its growing number of employees before settling into 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California in 2004 to support its 800+ workforce. It has remained here to this day, and holds thousands more.
Google also opened its first international office in Tokyo in 2001 and opened its European HQ in Dublin in 2004, initially creating 300 jobs. It now has over 2,000 staff working in Ireland. Globally, Google has over 20,000 staff members.
The company has released countless different products throughout the years, including AdWords, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google Apps, Street View, Chrome, Android, Google+ and Gmail.
It acquired YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65bn in stock and acquired DoubleClick in 2008 for US$3.1bn. It recently acquired Motorola Mobility for US$12.5bn.
Google is celebrating its 13th birthday with a Google Doodle of its logo in front of a birthday cake.
