Google turns 25; celebrates birthday with a doodle

Google, everyone's favourite search engine, turned 25 years old on Wednesday (27 September) and is celebrating its birthday with a doodle. Taking a "walk down memory lane", the company showcased different doodles on its birthday over the years. The latest one comes with a GIF which turns 'Google' into 'G25gle' - marking the 25 years. Once you click on the logo, you can see confetti on the page.

"Today's Doodle celebrates Google's 25th year. And while here at Google we're oriented towards the future, birthdays can also be a time to reflect. Let's take a walk down memory lane to learn how we were born 25 years ago," the company wrote in its blog.

It added, "Much has changed since 1998 — including our logo as seen in today's Doodle — but the mission has remained the same: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful…Thank you for evolving with us over the past 25 years. We can't wait to see where the future takes us, together."

Google was founded by doctoral students Sergey Brin and Larry Page who met in Stanford University's computer science program in the late 90s. The two soon learned that they shared a similar vision - to make the World Wide Web a more accessible place. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, and on September 27, 1998, Google Inc. was officially born.

While the company observed its birthday on September 4 for the first seven years, it decided to shift the celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that this search engine was indexing.

The worldwide search engine's current CEO is Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Page on October 24, 2015. Page, meanwhile, took over the same position at Alphabet Inc. On December 3, 2019, Pichai became the CEO of Alphabet as well.

The history of the doodle dates back to 1998 - a month before Google was founded. The very first doodle was on the long-running "Burning Man" event in Black Rock City, Nevada.

Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai penned a note as a blog post regarding the company celebrating its 25th birthday. Reflecting on the first quarter century, he shared some thoughts on the opportunities with AI to do things that matter on an even bigger scale.

"This month, Google will celebrate our 25th birthday. It's a huge privilege to reach this milestone, made possible by the people who use our products and challenge us to keep innovating, the hundreds of thousands of Googlers past and present who have given their talents to building those products, and our partners who believe in our mission as much as we do…It's a time for some gratitude, and a moment to reflect," Pichai wrote.

He added, "An essential truth of innovation is that the moment you push the boundary of a technology, it soon goes from extraordinary to ordinary. That's why Google has never taken our success for granted."

Pichai's note further read, "Search is still at the core of our mission, and it's still our biggest moonshot with so much more to do…Of course, Google today is more than a search box. We have 15 Google products that each serve more than half a billion people and businesses and six that serve more than 2 billion users each."