The Google Doodle depicts a photograph of the search engine on a computer and is dated September 27, 2998. 

On this day, two Stanford PhD students Sergrey Brin and Lawrence Page published a paper about launching a prototype of a “large scale search engine”. 

Originally called ‘BackRub’, it soon went on to be renamed Google and years later it became a verb, finding a place in the Thesaurus. 

The students had written, “We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”

21 years later, Google is the most used search engine and operates in over 100 languages, and answers trillions of search queries annually.

Google has gone on to become a multinational technology company. Its parent company Alphabet Inc was reportedly worth an estimated $137 billion last year.

Wishes poured in on Twitter, with everyone thanking the search engine for being by their side in difficult times.