Google Celebrates its 15th Birthday With Interactive Piñata Doodle

By Vivek

| Published: Friday, September 27, 2013, 10:41 [IST]

Today, Google is celebrating its 15th birthday with an interesting interactive doodle on its search page. The fun filled doodle is more of a game. Users can hit the swinging star shaped piñata with a stick by simply pressing the space bar or the left click on the mouse. The moment the stick hits it, sweets will start dropping out of it. The number of sweets you get determines your score.

Google Celebrates its 15th Birthday With Interactive Piñata Doodle

On the occasion, Google also announced that it had updated its search algorithm to make it more responsive to user requests. The update is a part of Hummingbird update that the company has been rolling out gradually in the past months. Again the Hummingbird was a part of a redesign called Caffeine. To be more precise, Hummingbird update revised the way Google's search engine indexes websites. Reportedly, according to Amit Singhal, a senior vice-president for the company, the redesign will affect the analysis of about 90% of the search requests that Google gets.

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Both of them were PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. Soon they came up with a search engine and originally nicknamed it as "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol". Moreover, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu then.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a Susan Wojcicki's garage in California. She later became Google's executive. Now the company is worth more than $200 billion.