Google Celebrates It's 13th Birthday

Google was started in a garage by two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with $100,000 in seed money from Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

The google.com domain was registered on Sept. 15, 1997, and then Larry and Sergey filed for incorporation as Google Inc. on September 4, 1998, - the two had met at Stanford in 1995, and planned to launch a search service that would return an infinite amount of web resources. Thus the name, Google, which is a play on the mathematical figure, "googol," representative of the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

2002 brought Google News, Google Labs, and Froogle. Google Labs is where the company does its new developments, and Froogle, is its shopping search engine.

In 2003, Google was pretty much a household name worldwide, and 'googling' or 'google it' became a verb in the English language. Google mail (Gmail), Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google Chrome, Google Translate (Translates web and text pages), and a host of other Google creations followed in the years to come. Google shows no signs of stopping, either.

My favorite part of Google is its logo variations that they call Doodles. Google's Doodles are custom designed Google logos the company uses for holidays, famous peoples birthdays, and other notable events.
Like many people, I look forward to those special days so that I can grab the latest Google logo to add to my collection.

The idea for Doodles originated In 1998, the concept of the doodle was born when Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert and thus would be "out of office." The idea of decorating the company logo for an event was well received by its users.

In 2000, Larry and Sergey asked current webmaster Dennis Hwang, an intern at the time, to create a doodle for Bastille Day. As a result, Dennis was appointed Google's chief doodler and doodles became a regular occurrence on the Google homepage. As the demand for doodles rose in the U.S. and abroad. Creating doodles became the responsibility of a team of talented designers. The doodle team has created over 300 doodles for Google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally.

All doodles can be found at www.google.com/logos.

Here are some other fun Google tips from Randolph Hock, author of 'The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook', to help when searching with Google:

Find a product you saw on line but can't remember where,
Use: 'intitle' to search words in the title bar of web pages:
Example: intitle:"Frye boots"

Find narrowed-down information using a hyphen or minus sign
Example: jaquar-cars-football

Elliminate irrelevant links by using quotation marks
Example: "Bikram yoga"

Find document file types by using their extentions
Example: filetype.pdf, filetype.xls, filetype.ppt
or more specifically; Canon manual filetype.pdf
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ALSO,
7 things you can do directly inside Google's search field:

Perform calculations:
Type "78x.15" hit search, answer shows up at top of results page

Convert measurements:
Type "cups in liters" or "dollars in euros"

Track flights:
Enter airline and flight number

Locate packages:
Enter "track" plus the tracking number, the search gives a direct link to the status page

Look up addresses:
Type in home phone number to get mailing address

Get movie showtimes:
Type "movies" plus your zip code to see theaters and showtimes for the next 3 days

Listen to music:
(Through Google's partnership with lala.com)
you can type the title of a song and its artist to get a playable file in the results page