Happy 15th Birthday Google: Fast facts about the search engine

So, it's official. The well-known search engine, Google, is 15 years old. If you didn't know, all you had to do was look at the Google site today to find a birthday cake with the number 15 on top.

Google flaunted its birthday on the homepage on September 27, 2013. (Image via Google)

Here are some facts that you may not have known about Google.

1. This is what Google looked like in 1998:

 
2. The creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met at Stanford in 1995. (Brin was assigned to show Page around). A year later they were collaborating on search engines.

3. While brainstorming, they needed a significant amount of storage. The original storage assembly (containing 10 4 Gigabyte disk drives, giving 40 Gigabytes total) was actually made out of Legos. The Lego storage assembly (seen below) is now on display at Stanford.

Image via Stanford.

4. The name Google comes from the mathematical term “googol” which is a number represented by “1” followed by 100 zeros.

5. Google's first “doodle” in its Logo occurred in August 1998. It represented a stick figure man, the Burning Man, to show where Page, Brin, and up-and-coming Google crew would be that weekend, the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

  
Google's first doodle, August 1998. (Image via Google)

6. The first Google office was set up in Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Wojcicki is now Senior Vice President in charge of product management and engineering at Google and one of the most important Googlers.

7. Google's first press release announcing that Google received 25$ million in equity funding.

Google's first press release from 1990. (Image via Google)

8. In May 2000 Google won its first Webby Award.

9. Google News initially launched in September 2002 with just 4,000 news sources, now it has over 50,000 news sources.

10. In 2006, Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary added “google” to the dictionary as a verb meaning “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web.”

11. Go to this link. It will show you all the interest categories Google has placed you in based on your search history and browsing behaviors.

Happy Birthday Google.