Happy Tenth Birthday Google! When Are We Celebrating?

One day this month will mark Google’s official tenth birthday. They’ll most likely celebrate with a blog post and a special logo (this one was tweaked based on an earlier one). And we’ll see a slew of articles about how much they’ve accomplished in those ten years. A few publications couldn’t wait and got out there with their Google tributes last month.

So all we need to know is when to celebrate! Almost certainly on September 27. But the real answer is way more complicated than that.

Google is actually nearly 13 years old if you go by their own corporate history page: “By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website.”

But if you go by when the Google.com domain name was registered, they’ll turn 11 on September 15.

However, the date Google celebrates as their birth month is September 1998. They celebrated on September 7, their date of incorporation, until 2005. Since 2005 (and also randomly in 2002), they’ve celebrated on September 27.

So why do they celebrate it on the 27th? According to Danny Sullivan, who wrote about this mess last year, they pushed the birthday date forward in 2005 to all for the announcement of a index size milestone.

At least Google is consistently inconsistent: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”

So Happy 10th, 11th and/or almost 13th Birthday Google! First three people who sing happy birthday to Google in a video comment below (all the way through, full volume, GO for it) get a TechCrunch t-shirt.