Google is celebrating its 20th birthday today. You might be thinking "surely it's older than that", but it was founded in September 1998 and its first office was in the current head of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki’s garage.
Now you can get a good idea of what it must have been like to be one of the founders, Sergey Brin or Larry Page, as the company has painstakingly recreated their original home to present a full Street View experience.
You can walk through the several rooms in the Google 1998 office, discovering the many gadgets that were popular at the time. And there are plenty of Google merchandise memories to be found too. A veritable playground for big nerds like us.
Google has several other things you can do today to celebrate its birthday.
For a start, it has revealed a whole list of Easter Eggs that have been hidden in Google Search across two decades, some known, some more obscure, some recent, some old.
For example, did you know that if you type "flip a coin", Google will indeed flip a coin for you?
Here is a list of our 10 favourites:
- Pacman - brings up the famous Pac-Man Google Doodle
- Snake - play a game of the classic mobile game
- [pi] - will give you the generic calculator version of pi
- Is Google down - silly but funny nonetheless
- Bletchley Park - to get the answer in code on the right-hand side
- Google Gravity (then click I Feel Lucky) - watch as the world comes tumbling down
- Do a barrel roll - watch the screen rotate
- Internet speed test - does what it says on the tin
- Marquee HTML - the results bar scrolls
- To create an Easter Egg shaped graph type: 1.2+(sqrt(1-(sqrt(x^2+y^2))^2) + 1 – x^2-y^2) * (sin (10000 * (x*3+y/5+7))+1/4) from -1.6 to 1.6
There is also a list of some of the best Google Doodles since they were introduced here. We thoroughly recommend you check them out.
Happy birthday Google!