It’s said that one chance encounter can change the course of your life. In Google’s case, a chance encounter between two computer scientists changed the course of the Internet and the lives of millions.   

In 1997, Sergey Brin, a graduate student at Stanford University, just so happened to be assigned to show Larry Page, who was considering Stanford for graduate school at the time, around campus. By the next year, the two Google co-founders were building a search engine together in their dorm rooms and developing their first prototype. In 1998, Google Inc. was officially born. 

Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same. 

Happy 23rd Birthday, Google! 

 

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Drafts of the Doodle below