Google is celebrating 18 years as a company, and is marking the occasion in the only way the web giant knows how: with a Google doodle.
Today the Google home page features an animation of the logo's capital G contorting a long party balloon into the shape of "oogle", before being dragged skyward by the buoyancy of its own hot air.
Google celebrates its birthday on September 27, although its not clear what significance that date actually has. The company lists its incorporation date as September 4, 1998.
The first Google Birthday doodle was in 2002, celebrating four years. It was on September 27, although in the proceeding years a birthday doodle was posted on September 8 and September 7. Since 2005 it has always been September 27.
Google has grown incredibly over the years, and not just in the size and complexity of its celebratory doodles. At the time of its IPO in 2004 Google was given a market capitalisation of more than $US23 billion. By 2014, that had grown to $US397 billion.
Back in 2004, many expressed fears that the company's growth would ruin its culture, compromising its playful, anti-corporate image. Doodle's like today might indicate that, at least in some ways, the Google of old is still alive, although the cynical among us might say that the attitude used to be a reflection of the company's actual leadership and today is a reflection of its appointed "chief culture officer".
The most notable aspect of Google's growth is the many and varied ways its taken its algorithm-based approach to search engines and applied it to dozens of aspects of its users lives. Today we have advertising served by Google, productivity tools like email, office suites and online storage provided by Google, and its services also power many of the applications in our phones.
Most recently, Google unveiled new software that crunches user location data, emails and other information to plan and organise trips automatically. The company is also expected to announce two new smartphones — billed as the first ever to be designed wholly by Google — at an event next month.
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