Google celebrates surprises on 19th birthday

New Delhi Sep 27 (IANS) Google is celebrating its 19th birthday on Wednesday with a "surprise" spinner Doodle that allows users to explore 19 games it has launched over the years - including a new version of the snake game.

The reason Google is celebrating surprises is because it believes the search engine came into being because of a chance encounter between its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"They say life is full of surprises and Google s history is chock-full of them. In fact we wouldn t be here without them " Google said.

In 1997 Larry Page had just arrived at Stanford University to pursue his P.h.D in computer science. 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 world s most popular search engine

From there the two came together with a common goal in mind -- to organise the world s information and make it universally accessible and useful a mantra that would go on to become Google s mission statement.

The two hunkered down in a garage - Google s first office - and got to work.

Named for the number "googol" (a 1 followed by one hundred zeroes) Google currently serves more than 4.5 billion users in 160 countries.

--IANS
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