Happy Birthday, Google: Google is 10 years old

In a post at the official Google blog, Marissa Mayer, VP of search products at Google, and Dennis Hwang, the “doodles” guy, revealed Google’s new doodle celebrating Google’s 10th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Big G!

Here are some amusing facts about Google:

• Google originally started off as a brainchild of two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
• Google search was run on university servers for a year, after which bandwidth and resource usage was too much for the authorities to ignore.
• Google founders also have the distinction of having received a $100,000 cheque from (hold your breath) - David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo (no less )
• Larry and Sergey received the cheque payable to “Google Inc.”, which according to them, did not exist at the time of receiving the cheque. The cheque stayed uncashed for several weeks. Sergey then rallied to raise enough money and support from family and friends so that he could cash the cheque.
• Googe’s doodles originated from some stick figures put up by Larry and Sergey.

The original Google homepage [click here for an archived page]
• Google’s original logo was created by Sergey Brin after he learned how to use GIMP, a free image editing program (see our posts about free GIMP brushes and plugins, and beginner’s guide on installing plugins and brushes).
• The Google corporate history page lists major milestones in Google’s history, right from its founding to turning 10 years old.

Related reading:

• How to search on Google from Firefox address bar (like Google Chrome)
• What is Google Juice?
• Is Google becoming the next Technorati?
• Google Sandbox: All you ever wanted to know