Yes, today's Google's 9th birthday. Nine years may seem so short a time to create a giant company. But Google is an exceptional exception!

Google.stanford.edu in late 1997. Sergey Brin in 1999 says, "A perfect search engine will process and understand all the information in the world ... That is where Google is headed."

Google.com, meanwhile, started as a search engine and it remains as such up until today. The difference is that it is trying to be much more than that. What has become of Google? Philipp Lenssen has an accurate list of the search engine giant's achievements...

* "The Google homepage goes out of Beta
* A Google Friends newsletter is started to address "Googlers," originally the term for Google users
* Google teams up with RealNames to bring now-forgotten Internet Keyword support to their search engine
* Google bought a huge newsgroup archive from Deja News and turned it into Google Groups. The first mention of Madonna on the internet is now owned by Google Inc.
* Google created a technology playground called Google Labs, where they release tools such as Google Sets
* Yahoo switches to Google results, but later changes their mind and develops their own search engine back-end to compete with Google and Microsoft in the club of the three only high-scale search engines worldwide
* Eric Emerson Schmidt, then 46, replaces Larry Page, then 28 years old, as boss of Google
* Google shows context-relevant AdWords in search results, and later AdSense on external websites
* Aaron Swartz starts posting news on Google on the Google Weblog
* Google releases more and more company blogs to communicate with people outside the company
* Google releases Gmail, which many thought was an April Fool's prank due to the at the time incredible storage of 1 Gigabyte
* Google went through an Initial Public Offering, meaning the company gets special attention from stock market investors
* Google enters China and decides to compromise its mission by self-censoring human rights websites, proclaiming a change from "don't ever be evil, period" to "scales balancing what Google thinks is least evil"
* Google releases a set of programming frameworks called GData
* Google releases a set of client-side, ad-powered JavaScript APIs, ditching support for their server-side, ad-free SOAP API
* Google releases a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, and later a presentations tool, all with a focus on online collaboration
* Google publishes their Google Apps suite for companies
* Google starts showing good-resolution photos of people on the streets as part of mining public information and making it accessible
* Google's co-founder Sergey Brin in a speech given on a Google Developer Day says we've come full circle, as the generation which grew up with the web is now starting to create on the web, determining its shape... a self-increasing feedback loop causing exponentially growing development (or so one would hope).
* and much, much more."

Happy Birthday Google!