Google Turns 23: Here Are 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The Internet Giant

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 at Stanford University.

Google is celebrating its 23rd birthday today, commemorating its official establishment on September 27, 1998. The Internet giant is celebrating 23 years of existence with an animated chocolate cake on its homepage. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 at Stanford University. The search engine they built together went live on Stanford's network in 1996. In 1998, Google Inc was officially born. "Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe," Google wrote in a blog post about the new Doodle. "From its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world's information accessible to everyone remains the same," the post read further.

Google was originally called BackRub

Google has its origins in BackRub - a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Some speculate that Google's original name was BackRub because the program analysed the web's "back links". According to Google's website, Larry and Sergey, working from their dorm rooms in the late 90s, built a search engine that "used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub."