September 27, 2023 – Google

Today is Google’s 25th birthday! The company was founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. Originally, they called their search engine “BackRub”, because it checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. They eventually changed the name to Google, which is a misspelling of the word “googol”, a math term represented by the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. They chose this name to signify that the search engine would provide large quantities of information.
Like many other Silicon Valley tech companies, Google’s first office was in a rented garage. Today, it’s headquartered at the Googleplex, a sprawling 2 million square foot complex in Mountain View, California. Employees there can enjoy swimming pools, sand volleyball courts, a bowling alley, massage rooms, and 18 different cafeterias.
The first time Google was used as a verb on TV was in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.
When Google launched in 1998, it averaged around 10,000 daily searches. Today, it’s estimated that the search engine processes about 99,000 search queries every second. That’s about 8.5 billion searches per day! The top Googled questions of 2023 have been: Where is my refund? Is Rihanna pregnant? What time is the Super Bowl? and How many ounces in a cup?
Google and Youtube (which they also own), are the top 2 visited websites in the entire world. Forbes ranked the company 2nd on their list of most valuable brands. Learn more here.