IndustryDidn’t Google Just Have A Birthday?

Didn't Google Just Have A Birthday?

No, you aren’t losing your minds. Just earlier this month, Search Engine
Watch and a wave of other sites
wished Google
a happy 7th birthday on September 7. What’s going on with Google having another
7th birthday today?

The wishes earlier this month were sparked by this

page
from Google’s Help Center. It’s now gone, but here’s what it said:

Google’s official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it
would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and
today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we’re just
getting started. To discover more about Google’s history, please visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html.
To learn about our mission, please see http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

For the time being, you can see a cached copy of the page yourself

here
.

So what’s the deal? How does Google get to have two birthdays in the same
month? Google’s Marissa Mayer told me when I asked her about this earlier this
week that Google internally has often celebrated the birthday on various
different days in September over the years. It’s now settling on Sept. 27.
Google the Virgo becomes Google the Libra!

Honestly, it’s hard to not have a cynical eye that settling on this date was
also a convenient news peg to hang the new
size
announcement
. But now that there’s this new official date, I guess there’s
no going back from it.

For those unaware, Queen Elisabeth II has both her “real” birthday and an

official one
that the United Kingdom celebrates. The Netherlands
does
the same thing, as other countries no doubt do, as well. It’s sort of like how
Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays used to be holidays of their own in the US,
until it was more convenient to have an official
Presidents’ Day holiday
always happening right against the weekend.

So as Gray Hat News points out in is humourous
The Queen of Search Engines
post, whatever Google’s real birthday was, we’ve not got a new official/observed
one to follow.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread,
Happy 7th
Birthday Google?

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