Happy birthday to Google... 26 today?

It's very rare that you will see a company's name used so often that it becomes a verb!

Many of us say we're 'Googling' whenever we do research on the internet.

And it's easy to understand why - Google is one of the most used search engines on the internet - worldwide!

Today it's celebrating its 26th year in operation - but some people are really confused about when the company's birthday actually is.

Who created Google?

Although Google is celebrating today - there might even be cake and a party at its headquarters in California - it was first registered as a company on 4 September 1998.

American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually launched the website a year earlier on 15 September 1997, while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California.

A blog post on Google's website explains "The exact date of our company's founding is up for debate, even for those of us who are in the business of providing answers. Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, but for more than a decade we've celebrated our birthday on September 27."

Google headquarters is in California

What is a search engine?

The 'www' at the start of a website stands for world wide web and that's made up of nearly two billion websites in total.

Each of these websites has something called a URL, which is the address for a webpage.

If you don't know the URL for a website you want to visit, you might use something called a search engine.

A search engine is a program that finds webpages which contain the words that you want information on and search for.

Why is it called Google? And what does it stand for?

The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, which is the name of a huge number. Written down, it's the number one followed by 100 zeros - it was picked as the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

Its said that when Sergey Brin came to register his new website, he misspelled Googol and 'google.com' was born.

The winning design of a Doodle 4 Google competition

When did Google start doing Doodles?

Google likes to commemorate important dates with specially designed logos known as Google doodles.

These might feature colourful drawings or even games and animations.

For example, ahead of their birthday this year Google have released a Google birthday surprise spinner - which shows old Google doodles.

The first ever Doodle was created for the Burning Man Festival in 1998 - which is a week long celebration of arts and expression in the US state of Nevada.

The founders of Google used it as a way of letting people know they would be out of the office that week.