Google celebrates its birthday on September 27, so what makes September 4 special for the company – Times of India

Google celebrates its birthday on September 27 every year, so what makes September 4 special for the company? September 4 is the day when Google was incorporated. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, at a garage in Menlo Park, CA, by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company in fact celebrated its birthday on September 4 for 7 years after which it was moved to September 27.
The decision to move Google’s birthday from September 4 to September 27 was to mark the day when the company indexed a record number of search pages. Google reportedly wanted its birthday to coincide with indexing a record number of pages, solidifying its position as a leading search destination. This year, Google will be celebrating its 26th birthday. And since then there is no disputing the fact that Google reinvented the way the world searches and use information. The company has a whole host of apps and tools that many consumers use on a daily basis, from its search engine and Gmail to Google Drive, its file storage service Google Cloud.
Google renamed itself Alphabet in 2015, making Google a subsidiary. In a blog post announcing the move, founder Larry Page said that the new entity would help the company take a long-term view and improve the “transparency and oversight” of its actions. The new entity, he wrote, was an “alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return over benchmark), which we strive for!” Alphabet. “G Is for Google.”

The ‘garage success story’

Coming to the famous garage story, in the year 1998, Page and Brin decided to turn their research project into a full-fledged company. They rented a garage in Menlo Park, California, from Susan Wojcicki (who would later become the CEO of YouTube) and started working on their search engine, which they initially called Backrub.
The garage served as the company’s headquarters for the first few months. It is said to be a humble space, filled with computers, ping pong tables, and a bright blue carpet. In 1999, Google moved out of the garage and into a larger office in Palo Alto. From there, the company continued to grow and expand, eventually becoming one of the most influential tech companies in the world.
While the garage may seem like a distant memory now, it remains a symbol of Google’s humble beginnings and the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled its success.
“Larry and Sergey first wrote down our mission 25 years ago: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. They had an ambitious vision for a new kind of search engine to help people make sense of the waves of information moving online. The product they built, Google Search, went on to help billions of people around the world get answers to their questions,” is how Google CEO Sundar Pichai described it.