Google celebrates 14th birthday with animated chocolate cake doodle

27 Sep 2012

Tech giant Google has served itself up a virtual chocolate treat today to celebrate its 14th birthday, as an animated cake doodle is emblazoned across its homepage.

Head to the Google homepage and you will be greeted with a birthday cake featuring 14 candles in the tech titan’s colours – blue, red, yellow and green. Then, as the cake gets gobbled up, the doodle transforms into leftover wrapping with the remaining cake appearing to spell the Google name, and the spent candles strewn underneath.

The search engine giant Google filed for incorporation on 4 September 1998, although the company celebrates its birthday on 27 September each year.

It was in 1996 that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two computer science graduate students at Stanford University, began working on a search engine called BackRub. They changed the name of the initial search engine to Google, as a play on the word ‘googol’, a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Eric Schmidt arrived in March of 2001 as Google’s chairman of the board, before becoming CEO in August of that year. Page became CEO of the company in April 2011.

Google’s current headquarters are in Mountain View, California.

To mark its 14th birthday, Google has launched its Google for Entrepreneurs initiative to help support start-ups across the globe via online resources and local programmes.

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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