HBD Google - and 19 years of saying 'just Google it'

New Delhi:  Want to know 99 ways to impress your crush, dying to make that delicious chocolate cake or anxious to learn whether that nagging headache is something serious?  Just Google it, of course. For 19 years, the search engine has been the answer to all our queries, from the most random to the most meaningful.

And on its 19th birthday today, Google, which made the ‘doodle’ famous and part of all our online lives, spun another surprise. Its special doodle to mark the day features a spinning wheel to explore 19 surprises launched over 19 years in a simple and fun way through games such as tic-tac-toe and snakes and ladders. With every spin of the wheel, the player gets to play the best of Google’s Doodle games.

Over the 19 years, Google has progressed beyond just providing search results. Apart from producing its own hardware and software, it has delved into areas like self-driving cars, synthetic intelligence & gadget mastering and Google analytics. Google is named after the “Googol”, which is basically the number 1 followed by a hundred zeroes.

The search giant, which was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, currently serves 4.6 billion users across 160 countries – searching for things in 123 different languages.