Google Turns 23 And Celebrates Birthday With A Cake Doodle: Here Are 10 Interesting Facts About The Internet Leviathan

Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL is celebrating its 23rd birthday by showcasing a cake doodle that doffs its top layer as a hat. Here're some interesting facts you should know about Google to join the company in the celebrations:

1. Google was incorporated on Sept. 4, 1998, and held its initial public offering on the Nasdaq on Aug. 14, 2004. The company has celebrated its birthday on different dates but settled on Sept. 27 to celebrate an important “index-size” milestone since 2005, as per a report from U.K.’s Guardian newspaper.

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2. The search engine leviathan, as simply calling it a giant doesn't quite cut it, had humble beginnings from a project conceived in a dorm room by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The original search engine was called “Backrub,” as per Google’s account of its own history.

3. The nascent search engine was soon renamed Google after the mathematical term “googol,” which is just a fancy way of saying 1 with 100 zeroes after it. 

4. From the dorm room, Google graduated to a garage in 1998 after the company was incorporated in August 1998 post an investment of $100,000 by Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems.

5. In its heydays, Google was known for the catchphrase, “Don’t be evil” and for being unconventional. After all the company began with a clean page with white background and a simple search button.

6. Today, Google employs more than 60,000 people in 50 countries and has billions of users around the world.

7. Google's empire spans video streaming in the form of YouTube, email services by Gmail, office software from Workspace, and much more. The company has fingers in pies such as cloud and quantum computing, wearables, and mobile hardware and software along with self-driving vehicles.

8. Alphabet, the parent of Google is currently the third-largest company by market capitalization behind Microsoft Corporation MSFT, and Apple Inc AAPL. Alphabet has a market cap of nearly $1.9 trillion, which is more than Amazon.com, Inc AMZN, Facebook Inc FB and Tesla Inc TSLA. 

9. When the company was listed its founders offered 19,605,052 shares at $85 per share and it had a market capitalization of $23 billion.

10. The company’s transformation into an internet behemoth has not been without controversy. This month, the U.S. Justice Department is reportedly planning a second anti-competitive lawsuit against Alphabet over its digital advertising business. In the European Union regulators are mulling opening investigations into the company’s digital advertising practices by the end of this year. Google has also run into trouble with regulators in Japan and Australia recently.

Price Action: On Friday, Alphabet Class A shares closed 0.71% higher at $2,844.30 in the regular session. On the same day, the company’s class C shares closed 0.57% higher at $2,852.66.

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Photo: Courtesy of Google