It's Google's 25th birthday!
On this day in 1998, two individuals brought to life a creation that revolutionized the internet.
Before Google, if you're old enough to remember, obtaining assistance for term papers or settling bets with friends often involved consulting encyclopedias.
However, in the late 1990s, tech visionaries started creating tools to streamline information retrieval, leading to the emergence of several startups, such as Yahoo and Ask Jeeves in 1996.
Ultimately, the startup created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Stanford computer science students at the time, came to dominate the industry.
So much so that "Google" is now a verb.
Originally named Backrub (thank goodness that didn't stick) Google changed its name to a clever play on the word "googol," which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes and technically means "a very large number."
According to Google, Page and Brin's mission was “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It's safe to say they've more than succeeded in this mission.
The search engine now processes an astonishing 99,000 search requests per second, around the clock. This equates to 8.5 billion daily searches and about 2 trillion searches worldwide each year.
Last year, Google generated over $250 billion for Alphabet, its parent company.
Google started celebrating its anniversary on Sept. 27 in 2005, changing from its original date of incorporation on Sept. 4, 1998, due to a shift in how it indexed pages.
So today we say: Cheers to Google and to many more years of us being curious!
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