September marks 15 years since graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up a small web crawler from a garage in Silicon Valley, which went onto become the world's biggest search engine.
The site was originally called BackRub, but was changed in 1997 to Google - a misspelling of the word googol which is a term for the number one followed by one hundred zeros.
There is a little confusion around when Google's official birthday is, but reports claim papers to incorporate the company were filed on September 4 1998. The company became incorporated three days later and the domain was registered on September 15.
A screenshot from the beta version of Google: September marks the 15th anniversary of when Google was first incorporated by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company started from a garage in Silicon Valley in 1998 and is now the world's largest search engine -with more than 13 billion searches a month.
Google's 15th birthday: 15 things you didn't know
From the company's original name to the first Google doodle, we search the archives of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's tech giant for some little-known titbits.
Google is 15 years old today. To celebrate, here are 15 facts you probably didn't know about them.
1. Google was originally called BackRub. The homepage read: "BackRub is a 'web crawler' which is designed to traverse the web."
3. The first Google doodle was a Burning Man symbol. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to the Burning Man festival in 1998 and added the doodle to let users know they were away from the office that weekend.
4. Google hired its first in-house chef, Charlie Ayers, in November 1999, when the company had just 40 employees.
5. Ayers went on to become the firm's executive chef, overseeing a team of 150 employees across 10 cafes at its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
6. You can use Gmail in more than 50 languages. These include: Welsh, Basque, Tagalog, Malayalam, Telugu and Cherokee.The first Google Doodle from 1998 – incorporating the Burning Man logo. Photograph: Google
8. One of those millionaires was masseuse Bonnie Brown, who worked at the company giving back rubs for $450 a week back in 1999.
9. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which bypasses the results page to take users directly to the first result of their search, has been estimated to cost Google around $100m in lost ad revenue every year.
10. Google hires goats. In 2009, the company rented around 200 goats for a week to eat the grass and fertilise the soil at its California headquarters.
12. Almost all of rival company Mozilla's money comes from Google. The firm pays $300m a year to be the default search engine on Mozilla's web browser Firefox.
13. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16% of the company.
15. A new Google employee is known as a "Noogler" and a former employee is referred to as a "Xoogler".
