Google is celebrating its 28th anniversary this September 27th with a commemorative Doodle on its homepage. The company, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to pay tribute to its origins by bringing back a nostalgic image of its first logo.
The date, however, does not coincide with the legal incorporation of the company , which took place on September 4, 1998. This small contradiction is nonetheless significant within a story full of changes, coincidences, and decisions that have made Google much more than a search engine.
A birthday with more tradition than paperwork
Corporate records place the incorporation of Google Inc. on September 4, 1998 , but the company has never used that day to celebrate its anniversary. Instead, September 27 has become the official date, despite not being linked to any specific company milestone.
Google itself has acknowledged in the past that it has used several different dates over the years. Although it has remained on September 27th since 2006, during the early years the celebration fell on various days in September, causing some confusion among users.
A spokesperson explained at the time that there are many possible dates to commemorate the company's founding: its legal incorporation, the hiring of its first employee, or the domain registration. Therefore, the entire month of September is often treated as a kind of birthday celebration within the company.
From BackRub to Google: a name that was born from a mistake
The project began in the late 1990s at Stanford University, where Page and Brin developed a search engine initially called BackRub . Their algorithm, called PageRank, ranked web pages based on the links they received and their relevance.
The final name came later, inspired by the mathematical term "googol ," which represents a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. When checking the domain's availability, the word was misspelled, and that mistake gave rise to one of the most recognized brands in the world.
The first Doodle also had nothing to do with a special occasion. In August 1998, the founders placed a small figure next to the logo to announce that they were out of the office at the Burning Man festival , an anecdote that started one of the company's most visible traditions.
The expansion beyond the search engine
After going public in 2004, Google accelerated its transformation. That same year, it launched Gmail , with a storage capacity that was groundbreaking at the time. A year later came Google Maps , and in 2006 the company acquired YouTube for $1.650 billion.
The launch of Google Chrome in 2008 and the arrival of Android as a mobile operating system further expanded its ecosystem. The company also relocated to Mountain View and in 2015 underwent a sweeping corporate reorganization with the creation of Alphabet Inc. , its parent company, while Sundar Pichai assumed the role of CEO of Google.
Artificial intelligence as the new central axis
In recent years, artificial intelligence has become one of Google's top priorities. Technologies like BERT and the Gemini family of models have helped improve natural language understanding and bring generative capabilities to products like the search engine, Gmail, and Docs.
To support this development, the company has also invested in Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) , its specialized hardware for machine learning tasks. The stated goal is to make these capabilities faster, more useful, and more accessible to a growing number of users.
Twenty-eight years after that university project, Google is one of the most influential technology companies in the world. Its anniversary is celebrated with a nostalgic Doodle, but the official date remains an oddity : it's not based on the legal constitution, but rather on the custom of having maintained September 27th for the past two decades. In the interim, the company has expanded from search engines to maps, video, browsers, mobile devices, and artificial intelligence, without entirely abandoning that air of an experiment born on a university campus.
