WASHINGTON:  Search engine giant Google has turned 23 years old on Monday.

Marking the special occasion, the company unveiled a special cake-themed doodle on its homepage. The animated doodle features a cake with “23” written on top of it, with a birthday candle indicating “L” in “Google”.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998, as part of a PhD project.

The two ideated the firm in 1995. By 1996, they had reportedly built a search engine, initially called ‘BackRub’, that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages.

“Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe, and while much has changed from the early days of Google, from its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centers globally, its mission of making the world’s information accessible to everyone remains the same.

Happy 23rd Birthday, Google,” a post on the official Google Doodle blog read. Interestingly, Google was originally founded on September 4, 1998.

According to reports, in 2005, the company changed the birth date to September 27 to make it coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that the search engine was indexing. (ANI)