The two brainy guys Sergei Brin and Larry Page met in Stanford and hit it off, in September 1997 they registered Google.com as a domain. The name—a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros—reflects Larry and Sergey’s mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. The rest as the cliche goes “is history”. Did you know the initial search engine they built was called BackRub?

Today the world biggest search engine created by the 2 students celebrates its 17th birthday, albeit the actual day is not clearly identified as the coding would have been going on for months and actual beta version were not properly recorded, but the public listed tech firm has chosen 28th as the date of choice.

Quote from google: “In the world of computer programming, 17 is widely considered the least random number. To assume we made it this far without a little luck, though, would be like assuming lava lamps, turtlenecks, and servers held together by building blocks are harbingers of success. For our 17th birthday, we offer a glimpse into our humble beginnings, when branded hockey jerseys were cool and Savage Garden had a number-one single.”

PC.com was established 2 years after these 2 guys made the world most popular search engine, we are glad we were part of those early times, in fact our past issues did feature news on this spartan search engine that had a weird name.

We like how Google had an exclamation mark at the end of the name, tribute to yahoo! maybe? Early team of 1997, all millionairess we presume.

The birthday will also mark a significant event that will be taking place in Mountain View.