Nineteen years ago Google was created in a garage by two Stanford University students. Now it is the world’s most used search engine.
To celebrate, the company has made a Doodle surprise spinner that lets users play interactive games from the search engine’s archives.
Among the games are old favourites such as Snake, the arcade game Pac Man and tic-tac-toe – as well as more recent additions such as Battle against spicy peppers and Help pangolins fall in love.
To celebrate, the company has made a Doodle surprise spinner that lets users play interactive games from the search engine’s archives
Other games include the musical puzzle game celebrating Beethoven’s 245th birthday and the Magic Cat Academy Halloween game from 2016.
This doodle is available on the Google homepage.
Users can click on the animation which then starts spinning and randomly stops on one of the 19 games.
Users can then choose to play the game or spin again.
Users can play Snake by using the spinner or by searching ‘snake game’ or ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’.
The oldest on the list is the arcade game Pac Man, which was the Google home page on 21 May 2010.
When it was first launched it was estimated to have squeezed 4.82 million hours of play from people globally at an estimated cost of $120 million (£90 million).
The company has also added a game called Birthday Piñata which celebrated Google’s 15th birthday in 2013.
‘In 1997, one of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page, had just arrived at Stanford University to pursue his P.h.D in computer science’, Google wrote on its 19th birthday blog page.
‘Of all the students on campus, Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, was randomly assigned to show Page around. This chance encounter was the happy surprise that started it all’.
The oldest on the list is the arcade game Pac Man, which was the Google home page on 21 May 2010 (pictured)
The company has also added a game called Birthday Piñata which celebrated Google’s 15th birthday in 2013 (pictured)
The company is now used by more than 4.5 billion users in 260 countries speaking 123 languages.
The Google Doodles were born in 1998 after founders drew a stick man behind the second ‘o’ of Google so people would know they were at the Burning Man festival and not in the office.
Google has also added the Snake game to its search (pictured)
They subsequently decided to decorate the logo to mark cultural moments.
Since 2013, has celebrated its birthday on 27 September but not even Google seems to know when it really formed.
In 2003, Google celebrated its fifth birthday on 6 September, while in 2004, it claimed its sixth birthday was on 7 September.
None of these dates seem to have any particular importance in Google’s birth.
On Google’s history page, it lists its incorporation date as 4 September, 1998, yet there is no reference to 6, 7 or even 27 September.
In 2013, Google admitted that it had four different celebration dates, but that it would be sticking to September 27 in future– which is the birthday of the first Doodle.