Happy 16th Birthday Google

Can the search giant really only be 16 years of age today?

Has Google really only hit it's mid-teens already?

Yes, the site that made search simple and pioneered & perfected the pay-per-click advertising model was only founded in 1998 by two Stanford doctoral students called Sergey Brin and Larry Page who developed a bunch of algorithms that turned the search marketing upside down.

Google & birthdays - personalisation to make you smile

Today is the 14th of September, my birthday. And when visiting the Google homepage this evening I saw a great 'Google Doodle', that of a birthday present and a cake with a candle in it.

"Oh" I initially thought "it's Google's birthday as well as my own". But then thought back to reports I had read recently about Google's birthday being in January or a range of dates in September including the 15th .... but not the 14th. Had Google got its own birthday wrong? Was a server giving the wrong date and showing the present and cake image a day ahead of time?

No!

Google knows my birthday thanks to a complete profile of me I entered some while back. It would therefore seem that some clever programmer there has created a small bit of personalisation code to display this image when the anniversay of my birth comes around.

Clever, engaging, thoughful and just a little bit all-knowing. Just how I like my search engines.