Google turned 27 today and true to tradition, the tech giant marked the occasion with a nostalgic doodle on its homepage — this time bringing back its “first ever” 1998 logo. While the world smiled at the throwback, employees inside Google’s campuses had their own reasons to celebrate.
At Google’s Bengaluru office, the birthday spirit was in full swing. Keerthana M, a project management apprentice, as per her LinkedIn, shared glimpses from the festivities. “Yesterday, we celebrated another year of Google’s journey – officially marked on September 27th each year. This year, Google turned 27 years old – that’s over 236,000 hours (and counting!) of shaping the way the world searches, connects, and innovates,” she wrote.
She described how the Bengaluru campus was buzzing with “TGIT (Thank Google It’s Thursday) energy”. “At our Bangalore office, the birthday vibes were unmatched – the café was lit up with incredible food, TGIT energy flowing all around, and of course, the cake…It truly felt like being part of something much larger than yourself,” Keerthana wrote in the caption.
Why September 27 is celebrated as Google’s birthday?
Why September 27 and not September 4 when the company was officially incorporated in 1998? So, Google was first launched as a website on September 15, 1997, by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company was incorporated a year later on September 4, 1998. However, it later shifted its birthday celebrations to September 27 to mark the day Google indexed a record number of web pages.
Humble beginnings
Started as a project run out of a garage, the company went on to redefine how the world uses the internet. Its 2004 IPO set the tone for its financial might and in 2015, the creation of Alphabet Inc. made it even bigger. The tech giant’s current market capitalization is over $3 trillion.
And at 27, Google isn’t just a search engine anymore — it’s an ecosystem, a digital lifestyle and for many, an everyday verb.