Google doodle celebrates search engine's 11th anniversary

Google is celebrating its 11th birthday on Monday with another example of its famous Google “doodles”—a special logo on its search front page. The internet giant has added an extra L to its name to form an 11, representing its eleven years as a company.

However, there is some confusion over the exact date of the company’s birth.

Last year, Google put up its 10th birthday logo on September 2 and, according to its Wikipedia entry, it was incorporated as a privately held company on September 4 1998.

The world’s favourite search engine, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University, could also choose to celebrate on 15 September, the day the Google domain name was registered.

Google, whose name originated from a misspelling of the word ‘googol’—a one with 100 zeroes—may have been unable to celebrate its own birthday until now because it has been busy changing its famous masthead to reflect other anniversaries.

Google used a series of three logos of flying saucers and Martian fighting machines to mark the 143rd birthday of War of the Worlds author HG Wells, who was born on 21 September 1866. And last month Google changed its logo into a telescopic doodle to mark the 400th anniversary of the first public demonstration of Galileo’s revolutionary telescope. - guardian.co.uk