Google celebrates 23rd birthday with homepage cake doodle

As everyone's favourite search engine Google turns 23 today, the company has decided to mark the special day with a special cake doodle on its homepage, as it does for so many other events and personalities.

The animated doodle features a cake with "23" written on top of it, with a birthday candle substituting for "L" in "Google."

While Google's foundation started in the year 1997, it was officially established as a company on September 27, 1998.

In 1997, Google co-founder Sergey Brin - then a graduate student at Stanford University - met its other co-founder Larry Page, who was considering Stanford for graduate school at the time.

By the next year, the two Google co-founders were building a search engine together in their dorm rooms and developing their first prototype. In 1998, Google Inc. was officially born.

"Every day, there are billions of searches on Google in more than 150 languages around the globe," Google wrote in a blog post about the new Doodle. "From its first server housed in a cabinet built out of toy blocks to its servers now being housed in more than 20 data centres globally, its mission of making the world's information accessible to everyone remains the same," the post read further.