14 Amazing Google Facts On Google's 14th Birthday (PICTURES)

Happy 14th Birthday Google!

Google is celebrating its birthday - with digital cake.

The search giant filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, but according to Wired they celebrate their birthday "whenever we feel like cake".

This year Google has unveiled an animated cake Google Doodle on its homepage to mark the occasion.

The cake has its candles lit, before being eaten away to reveal the Google logo. Very sweet.

Here are our 14 favourite Google facts:

  1. Google's original name was 'BackRub'
  2. The BackRub search engine is still accessible - but isn't working. "Many services are unavailable due to a local network faliure beyond our control. We are working to fix the problem and hope to be back up soon," says a message posted on the page in 1997.
  3. Backrub was hosted on ten 4GB hard drives in a storage case made of Lego
  4. 15% of Google's daily searches have never been typed in before
  5. 'Google' is a play on the word "googol", a term meaning a number 1 followed by 100 zeros
  6. Google's first company dog was called Yoshka
  7. In 2000, Google announced MentalPlex, a way to read your mind for search results. It was a joke.
  8. Google handles 100 billion searches per month
  9. ...and has 100 million active users of Google Plus
  10. Klingon has been an official language of Google since 2002
  11. The first Google Doodle was posted in 1998, to let people know that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were at the Burning Man festival
  12. 'Google' became a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006
  13. Google estimates more than one million spam pages are created each hour
  14. Google.com was registered in 1997 - a year before the site launched
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