The first Google Doodle was a reference to the Burning Man Festival of 1999. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. Hwang has been designing the Google Doodles ever since.
Clicking on a Google Doodle links to a string of Google search results about the topic, which can drive a lot …

Even with the bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, the combined company would be unable to knock Google off its web search and web advertising throne, industry watchers say.
read more | digg story
Early history of google
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford. In search for a dissertation theme, Page decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding …