Google is celebrating its 16th birthday with an animated Google Doodle, showing a birthday hat on the letter "G," which marks the heights of letters "o" and "l."
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and started out in 1996 as "BackRub," a search engine that ranked individual web pages by importance.
While Google celebrated its birthday on Sept. 27, it seems as though this is more out of convenience, because the company was actually incorporated on Sept. 7. Google celebrated Sept. 7 as its birthday until 2005.
In 2005, Google changed the date to Sept. 27 so that it would coincide with an announcement related to the record number of pages that it was indexing.
In 2013, the birthday doodle used was an interactive picture of a piñata. In 2012, there was a picture of a chocolate cake and the Google logo etched on that cake. In 2011, the doodle was a photograph that showed the celebrations that were happening for the birthday, including a cake with 13 candles.
Google has used art to celebrate a number of notable figures and dates over the years. Topics range from the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to Doctor Who.
The company has also become increasingly complex with its doodles, showing a playable guitar in honor of Les Paul, whose line of solid-body electric guitars has a loyal following.
Since Google was founded, it has grown and is no longer simply a search engine. The company now operates a popular mobile operating system in Android, is one of the largest email providers with its Gmail service and has myriad other web tools such as Google Drive. The company even started its own social media network with Google+.
Google is currently ranked as the most-visited website in the world, and is estimated to run over a million servers in data centers worldwide.
Google is expected to grow over the coming years, and is funding initiatives that range from driverless cars to Internet that is beamed down to remote, hard-to-reach areas from a Google Loon weather balloon. Not only that, but it is also in the augmented reality market with Google Glass. The company is set to release its next mobile operating system, Android L, in the coming months, along with a number of new Nexus devices.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page were only college students when they founded the company. Little did they know their company would go on to change the Internet.
