It
has come to be expected that Google will come up with a new Doodle
for special events. A mystery
interactive Google Doodle, released earlier this month, had
many speculating about its relevance and in May the internet giant
introduced a playable Google Doodle celebrating
Pac Man's 30th anniversary.
Today,
the significant event honors an important date for the company.
There are no interactive repelling balls or pac-attacks; this time
they have decided to keep it simple. The Google
Doodle gracing the company's home page is of a birthday cake with a
candle in it. The candle represents the “L” in the Google
name.
The
image, which was created by 89-year old Los Angeles painter Wayne
Thiebaud, celebrates the 12th anniversary of the California-based
company. Google was first incorporated on September 27, 1998.
Stanford
University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the idea
of Google in 1996 while working on a research project. The two
students worked on finding a better system to analyze the
relationships between websites. The technology at the time -- called
Page Rank -- determined a website’s relevance by its number of
pages and the importance of pages that linked back to the original
site.
The
duo's project was originally dubbed “BackRub”, because the search
engine checked back links to determine site importance. The
company name, later changed to Google,
originated from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number
one followed by one hundred zeros.
Thiebaud
is often connected to the "Pop Art" movement. His
creations, many painted in the 1950s and 1960s, include paintings of
cakes. This artist's work was used with the permission of Visual
Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) New York.
