A Google search page is seen through the spectacles of a computer user in Leicester, central England July 20, 2007.
Google marked its eleventh birthday on Sunday with a redesigned logo which displayed "Goog11e". However the search engine giant's actual birthday is somewhat in dispute. Last year, Google put up its 10th birthday logo on Sept. 2 and, according to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Google was incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998.
Google could also choose to celebrate on September 15 when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered Google's domain name while they were still PhD students at Stanford University.
Google actually began as a research project as far back as January 1996 though it did not become publicly available until sometime later. Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on Sept. 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 4 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.
Google's name originated from the misspelling of the word 'googol', the name applied to 10 to the power of 100, or a one followed by 100 zeros. The company has been busy changing its logos in recent weeks. A series of logos depicting UFOs had many on the Internet puzzling over Google's hidden message until all was revealed with one depicting Martian spaceships on what would have been the author H.G. Wells 143rd birthday. Wells is well known for his book the War of the Worlds.
Google often marks key events with logo changes, a click on which takes the Internet user to a Google search for the subject in question. Today they marked the birthday of Chinese philosopher Confucious. He would be 2,560 today.
