Happy Eighth Birthday, Google!

September-ish is Google’s birthday! Nathan Weinberg notices that the birthday cupcake only has five candles, but it’s because they are the Roman numerals VIII to mean eight.

You may be asking yourself: “Is Google’s birthday Sept. 7th or Sept. 27th?”. Check out my blog post from 2005 and you’ll see that (in my opinion) Google’s true birthday is Sept. 7th. I think one year (last year?) there was a lot of stuff going on Sept. 7th, so we didn’t get around to celebrating our birthday until Sept. 27th. So why do it on Sept. 27th again this year? Well, I know I forgot and didn’t even notice when Sept. 7th passed by. I mean, I had to keep my eye on the prize: Talk Like a Pirate Day on Sept. 19th.

48 Responses to Happy Eighth Birthday, Google! (Leave a comment)

  1. I don’t really care which day is the birthday, as long as there was one. πŸ™‚

    I was using Google when it still had the ‘beta’ background on the page, and the search results where much better than any engine I had used before. So I recommended it to anyone who had an internet connection (that’s a funny thought; didn’t everyone always have Internet?).

    Anyway, Happy Birthday G!

    P.S. G results can sometimes be frustrating πŸ™‚

  2. Of course ….

    Happy Birthday GOOG The Mother of All Search Engines πŸ™‚

    Btw, any birthday weather report about the new infrastructure πŸ˜‰

  3. Ofcourse it’s September 7th, because today is already my birthday (and I’m older) πŸ™‚

  4. So how are you going to celebrate is there any party or so?

    Akash

  5. September 7th is Google’s B-day! Nice that is my son’s as well… Guess we’ll have a Googgle themed party for his 2nd next year… lol

  6. Congratulations, guys! Wow, 8 years really isn’t much… Good work! How much of the original crew is left? (other than L+S)?

  7. Ah, ’98. My sophomore year in high school. Back then I used Dogpile for my searching. I’ll go ahead and chock that one up to teenage naivety and the fact that Google hadn’t been around very long. I know better now. πŸ˜‰

  8. Happy Birthday ! You’re certainly doing a better job than the ‘older’ kids πŸ™‚

  9. Happy Birthday! πŸ™‚

    By the way, have you seen your evil twins post yet?

    http://evilmattcutts.com/

    -Michael

  10. Congrats, but is this the future of google?
    http://www.yvoschaap.com/googlelive/

  11. LOL Michael, that’s mean πŸ˜€ — it reminds me of http://mattcut.com/blog/ , only more current!

  12. I am sure it is 7th and i remembered since its our wedding anniversary .
    It happened for me to be posting on the evilmattcutts guy: sorry my post should be here:( he forgot the spam protection thing on his blog)

    Hi Matt,
    A lot of evil ones are out there, on eof them is hitting top 10 on Google SERPS for the keywords β€œholdem poker” and when clicking you got a running software + pop ups and its launched via alice.it an ISP in France and Italy.

    kick them out. heheh

    Are you serious by saying about ask msn etc..(fromevilmattcutts ? Oh, yes why not, we should always stick to the facts.

    The reality is …
    It will happen sooner or later.

  13. well isn’t that ironic.. LinksManager’s birthday is also today.. not making that up- check whois. Congrats to everyone celebrating a birthday today. =)

  14. **Happy Birthday Google**

    **Happy Birthday LinksManager**

  15. September 7th is independence day in Brazil,. πŸ™‚

    8 years, I remember the first birthday of G I noticed,.. when it was just 5. A lot of stuff happened in these last 3+ years.

    Go Goooooooogle

  16. SEO Company, it was a pretty mellow birthday.

  17. it is one of the biggest frenh company and I saw the code they use, it is unbelivable !

  18. Hi Matt,

    This is of topic but I don’t know any other place to ask. Maybe you can do a blog topic on this.

    Does hosting affect ranking in the regional search? A Belgian dot.com website hosted in US. Does it shows up in regional search?

    BTW Happy Google Birthday.

  19. Google has created a massive industry to help all the community right from he home/personal use to webmaster/professional use.
    I respect Google’s service and too happy to congratulate them for their 8 years of uninterrupted and first class victory.
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOOOOGEE!!

  20. I’m very interested in Bockereyer question: it really seems that google shows up results based on server location.
    we are an italian hotels site, with server located in italy. In our experience, google is now going to rank our site only in google.it for italian and foreign keywords. In the last few weeks we have seen our google.com ranks disappear and our google.it ranks rise, as discussed here:
    http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3090106.htm
    In that case I think is a bad google behaviour as an italian company could better review italy hotels then a foreign company.
    Hope to see an answer here or a video that explains this new google change.

  21. However ……..
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOOGLE!!

  22. Happy Birthday Google ! We are grateful to the way you transformed the search engine scenario in just eight years !

    Matt. I just noticed another ‘Matt Cutts’ born in this month. Is he your twin?

    http://evilmattcutts.com

  23. I went online on the morning of the 27th anf though christ!
    I’ve heard of geo targetting,I know you know where I am and sometimes bounce me to .co.uk etc…..

    But putting a birthday cake on the homepage on my birthday – that’s amazing!
    I didn’t get a card or a present though πŸ™‚

  24. At first: Happy Birthday Google!

    Belive me, from todays perspective it is hard to send good wishes to someone who are doing a little evil at the last time.

    With doing Evil – I’m thinking about the way Google let webmasters walk through deepest darkness by setting some SERP 31 filter on websites without any comment to the webmaster about the WHY and TERM of this penalty.

    The way Google acts at the moment are close to following sample:
    get cought by police officers and locked in a cell and noone tells the reason and about the term for what you have been cought and for how long you have to stay in jail…

    There are many websites on the german market who had real good serp’s and from one day to an other they are finding itself on SERP 31. Many have checked their websites – sometimes with help of a second SEO to find out the reason, but could’nt find any…. In fact that many websites do have employees to pay – the webmasters need to know why Google gave a penalty and for how long anything else is unsocial against this people. Or does’nt Google take care about humanity. Me as a webmasters who are giving jobs to people do know about humanity and social care.

  25. Like many matured women she is hiding her age, BTW Happy Google Birthday!

  26. Altough it was yesterday, Happy Birthday and thanks Google . In spain it exists a song from a famous group with the title “El 7 de septiembre” 7th Sept, and speaks about an aniversary. πŸ™‚

  27. Eighth! It’s hard to believe this bouncing baby boy has grown so large for being eight years old!

  28. That blognewschannel page needs some serious sorting out – stuff overlapping so that it’s difficult to read. urgh!

    If this is the 8th birthday, then it’s a couple of months older than me on the Web, but I’d been in seo for quite a while time before Google emerged and I thought, “Great. Another engine to play with.” πŸ™‚

    It took time for Google to build up, but it was even slower than I’d realised.

  29. Well, happy birthday to Google. I’ll spend a bit more on adwords then, as a late birthday gift. Yeah, I know.. I’ve never been good at getting ideas for gifts!

  30. Google has created a massive industry to help all the community right from he home/personal use to webmaster/professional use.

  31. Belated Happy Birthday to Google :). To me, it’s simply amazing to see what Google has achieved in these 8 years and seems like it’s going to dominate the online world in the years to come.

  32. Matt,

    Are you going to provide a link to your Kin Folk?

    The evil one was kind enough to link to you.

  33. W.Helmer wrote:

    There are many websites on the german market who had real good serp’s and from one day to an other they are finding itself on SERP 31. Many have checked their websites – sometimes with help of a second SEO to find out the reason, but could’nt find any. In fact that many websites do have employees to pay – the webmasters need to know why Google gave a penalty and for how long anything else is unsocial against this people. Or does’nt Google take care about humanity. Me as a webmasters who are giving jobs to people do know about humanity and social care.

    People who’s well-being relies on search engine rankings build their houses on sand. There is nothing wrong with building your house on sand as long as you are willing to accept and deal with it when the sea causes it to crumble, or to be washed away.

    The problem with what you wrote is that you want the engines to freeze their developments and improvements at the point where your site is at the top, which is not very fair to other sites that come along later, is it? And it’s not very fair to sites that merit ranking higher than yours, but the engines weren’t good enough to rank them there until now.

    The major search engines are continually trying to improve their results by changing their algos so that the most relevant sites move upwards, and by trying to weed out unwanted sites and pages for various reasons. Changes in the results MUST happen if the engines are to improve their service, and we must expect changes to happen. It can’t be any other way. That’s not to say that the engines always get it right when they make changes, but changes will always happen, and we must expect them, and be prepared to live with them.

    That’s the way it is with search engines. If you don’t want your site’s visibility to be affected by changes, you can use the same methods on the Web that are used offline – advertise in prominent places. As long as you continue to pay for the ads, they’ll stay right where they are.

  34. It’s natural for a Web site to rely on SE’s for traffic. They (SEs) are here to stay. It is those that rely on only a few site pages that have built on sand.

    One should aim to get 100 hits from 50-100 pages, as apposed to 100 hits from only a few pages. More pages is your single best insurance against SE fluxuations. A very simple common sense approach that many “professional” SEO over-look.

    oh, happy belated birthday Google πŸ™‚

  35. @PhilC

    Most you said is absolut right. The critic I have at first is the worst communication from Big G. to let everybody in the dark about what happend to the new serps – even if you write real kindly questions to Google. And as far as I understood bsuiness in generell – it is always a partnership and partners should speak to each other, specially if there are any kind of problems – so that their is a chance to solve it. Not so with Google.

    Noone owns serp1 – and thats good so other do have chances too. But when I remember back about the philosophie of Google allways to present the top result, so I’d like to ask the following question: – We are selling some products totaly exclusive cross Europe – no other shop do have this product in his catalouge or website, no other information sites are on the net than ours, but wehn you search this product – Google shows the result on serp 31 and this is the critic. And all other sides who are placed befor us are Spammers for PP hard core sites and some joke sites with a handful of real senceless content.

    And: should’nt it be the first serp if I am searching for our own domain? But the result comes on serp 31. And I think that this is enough reason for some littel critic – or not?

    If there is no right at all to be on Serp 1 – at least your domain must have this right and it does not….at this time.

  36. I just noticed that Google has pressed the red button again. I could verify Google dance at two of the Google servers. This time Google is kind to me and rewared 7 of my 10 sites πŸ™‚

  37. Happy Birthday for all of you guys at the Plex.

  38. What you described is bad, W.Helmer, but the point I was trying to make is that nobody can rely on search engine rankings – not even when the site is totally unique, as yours is. Sometimes search engines do get it wrong, and sometimes they deal with one thing (a certain type of spam, for instance), and some innocent sites get caught up in it, because the engines can’t do it perfectly, and sometimes they issue penalties. But whatever the reason for the changes, they will continue to occur, and we all have to live with it.

    My income has suffered a number of times because of changes in Google, but it happens, and I have to carry on. I don’t have any employees so it’s only me that’s affected, but, if I had employees, I would take big steps to lessen the impact of the changes. Search engines are not the only sources of traffic, and, if continued traffic is important, then you really need to do something in advance of getting caught out, so at least some income continues.

    You mentioned a partnership. There is a sense in which the search engines and website owners are in a sort of partnership – search engines couldn’t exist without website owners, and if every webmaster suddenly barred Google from their sites, then Google would fold completely. But it isn’t the sort of equal partnership where a search engine needs to inform the website owner when a penalty is issued, or when the algo is about to change, and what it is about the algo that will change. They can’t do that. We have to accept it and do things to lessen the impact if and when it happens – preferably in advance.

    Relying on search engine rankings for the continued success of a business is folly.

  39. Thanks Google. Google got so big in just a span of 8 big year. And, there is no sign of slowing down. More power to Google. A Very Happy Birthday.

  40. Google edited their corporate history page to not say September 7 anymore (it definitely did before because this is a copy/paste from it):

    http://forums.digitalpoint.com/calendar.php?do=getinfo&e=9&day=2006-9-7&c=2

    Can I change my birthday too? From this day forward, my birthdate is January 1, 1986. I will be able to (finally) drink this New Years.

  41. I just know Google Birtday on 7th sept… Happy belated birthday Google!

  42. Wow only 8 years seems like you guys have been around forever
    Happy Birthday !

  43. better late then never … Happy Birthday πŸ˜‰

    I know there a lot of google-haters out there, just like Microsoft-haters. I don’t get it. I love Google and use almost all the different features. I think it’s just jealousy …

    Keep up the good work Google !

  44. Quoting VJ….
    >>> I was using Google when it still had the β€˜beta’ background on the page

    Google search appears to be the only Google product that ever got out of beta πŸ˜‰

  45. Happy b-day
    seems like a lifetime!

  46. We wish many happy returns of the day Google on its 8th birthday. We do wish “n” of years for google services and success….

  47. Happy birthday to Google ! πŸ™‚

  48. happy birthday to u google the reason i send this is because google is like the only site i go to to search for things thanks for being here

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