Google's 13th Birthday

 It's been 13 years since 1998 when two Stanford university students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, got together to form a company that would change the face of the Internet, for ever.

As Google enters its teenage years the company is well entrenched as the leader in the search engine market with more than 90 per cent of the search share, according to Internet statistics firm StatCounter.

Its Chrome web browser had 22 per cent of the global market in July, Microsoft's Internet Explorer had 42.5 per cent while Mozilla's Firefox had 28 per cent. Google's Android OS is also fast becoming the dominant player in the smartphone market.

For its 13th birthday Google has doodled for itself a photograph that shows Google's 13th birthday celebrations. There is a cake on a table with 13 candles on it, the Google logo sits around the table in party hats and gifts and baloons adding to the celebratory mood.

Interestingly, the selection of September 27 as Google's birthday seems to be a one of convenience than the actual date when the company was founded. Google celebrated September 7 (the day when the company was incorporated) as its birthday till 2005. In 2005 Google changed the date to September 27 to make it coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that the search engine was indexing.

Google doodles have gained immense popularity over the past few years and the Google team has put out commemorative doodles on events ranging from news events, civic milestones, birthdays, death anniversaries and important dates in history.

Google estimates it has created more than 900 doodles since 1998, with 270 of them running in 2010 and about 200 in 2011.