Google marked its 28th birthday on September 27, 2026, with a Doodle that looked back at an earlier version of its logo. The anniversary is a good excuse to revisit a few details that are easy to miss in the familiar story of two students and a garage.
For one thing, Google was not originally called Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in 1995 and began building a search engine that paid close attention to links between web pages. They called the project BackRub, a reference to the links pointing back to a page. It was a useful description of the idea, even if it was a name unlikely to survive on a search homepage.
The replacement came from googol, the mathematical name for 1 followed by 100 zeros. “Google” suited the scale of what Page and Brin hoped their search engine could handle. Long before the name became an everyday verb, it was a way of expressing just how much information there was to organise.
Then came a cheque with a problem attached. In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote Page and Brin a cheque for $100,000. It was made out to Google Inc., although the company had yet to be incorporated. Google’s own account places the cheque at the start of the business; the company was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998.
That date raises an obvious birthday question: why celebrate on September 27? Google has acknowledged the difference. September 4 is its incorporation date, while September 27 became the day it has celebrated with an annual Doodle for more than a decade. The birthday people see on the homepage is a tradition, not the date on the incorporation papers.
There is another Doodle detail tucked into those early weeks. The first Google Doodle appeared in August 1998, before Google was officially incorporated. Page and Brin used a small Burning Man figure in the logo as an informal out-of-office message while they were away.
What began as a practical note grew into a recurring feature of Google’s homepage.
This year’s nostalgic birthday artwork brings the story back to its starting point. The name, the logo and even the date of the celebration took shape at different moments. Twenty-eight years later, they are all part of what people recognise as Google.
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