HBD Google mark 19 years of ’just Google it’

Mangalore Today News Network

Sep 29, 2017: Just Google it, of course. For 19 years, the search engine has been the answer to all our queries, from the most random to the most meaningful.

They say life is full of surprises, and Google’s history is chock-full of them. In fact, we wouldn’t be here without them.

In 1997, one of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page, had just arrived at Stanford University to pursue his P.h.D in computer science. Of all the students on campus, Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, was randomly assigned to show Page around. This chance encounter was the happy surprise that started it all.

From there, the two came together with a common goal in mind: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, a mantra that would go on to become Google’s mission statement. The two hunkered down in a garage - Google’s first office - and got to work.

Billions of searches later, perhaps the happiest happenstance has been how Google has grown throughout the past 19 years. Named for the number “googol” (a 1 followed by one hundred zeroes), Google inches closer to its namesake each year, currently serving more than 4.5 billion users in 160 countries speaking 123 languages worldwide. What a wonder is ’Google’.

And on its 19th birthday Sept 28, Google, which made the ’doodle’ famous and part of all our online lives, spun another surprise. Its special doodle to mark the day features a spinning wheel to explore 19 surprises launched over 19 years in a simple and fun way through games such as tic-tac-toe and snakes and ladders. With every spin of the wheel, the player gets to play the best of Google’s Doodle games.

Over the 19 years, Google has progressed beyond just providing search results. Apart from producing its own hardware and software, it has delved into areas like self-driving cars, synthetic intelligence & gadget mastering and Google analytics.