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Google Rings in 27th Birthday With Nostalgia, Cake, and a Look Back at Its Journey
Bengaluru / Mountain View, September 27, 2025 — The world’s most-visited website turned 27 today, and Google marked the milestone with both a nostalgic throwback and vibrant celebrations across its campuses. While users worldwide were greeted with a Doodle showcasing the company’s first-ever logo from 1998, Googlers in Bengaluru and beyond rang in the occasion with parties, reflections, and a shared sense of pride in how far the company has come.
A Doodle From the Past
Google’s homepage on Saturday featured a playful Doodle resurrecting the scrappy, colorful logo that Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched with nearly three decades ago. For millions of users, the design was a reminder of the search engine’s humble origins: a Stanford University project that grew from a rented garage into a technology giant shaping everything from how we search to how we commute.
Interestingly, the company’s actual incorporation date was September 4, 1998. Yet since 2006, Google has chosen to mark its birthday on September 27. While the reasons remain ambiguous, many observers believe it ties back to early indexing milestones achieved around that date.
Bengaluru Joins the Party
Inside Google’s Bengaluru office, the birthday mood was impossible to miss. Cafés were decked with balloons and themed décor, the campus buzzed with live music and “Thank Google It’s Thursday” energy, and employees shared cake in what has become a ritual of collective pride.
Keerthana M, a project management apprentice who joined the company earlier this year, described the celebration as “being part of something much larger than yourself.” In a LinkedIn post, she reflected on how unimaginable daily life would be without Google’s ecosystem: “No instant answers, no YouTube tutorials, no Maps guiding us, no Gmail threads holding our work together. Hard to even imagine, right?”
Her photos from the event showed smiling colleagues, Google-themed desserts, and a distinctly local flavor to the global celebration.
27 Years, Billions of Users
From its early days indexing just a handful of websites, Google now processes over 8.5 billion searches every single day. Its product family spans Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Pixel smartphones, and Android — a mobile operating system that powers the majority of the world’s phones.
In 2015, the company reorganized under its parent firm Alphabet Inc., allowing Google to focus on its core products while sister companies pursued “moonshot” projects like self-driving cars and life sciences research. Today, CEO Sundar Pichai leads both Alphabet and Google, while co-founders Page and Brin continue to exert influence through their special Class B shares, even as they have stepped away from daily management.
Employees and Users Reflect
As is tradition, social media lit up with birthday wishes. LinkedIn users responded to Keerthana’s post with gratitude for the company’s products. One commented: “I honestly can’t imagine life without Gmail. It keeps me connected and organized every single day.” Another highlighted the importance of Maps: “It helps me go everywhere without anyone’s help. Thanks for making life easier.”
Meanwhile, Google Trends confirmed that curiosity about the celebration spiked across India, with top searches coming from Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Gujarat, and Telangana. Queries included “Google 27th birthday meaning” and “Google’s birthday date,” underscoring the fact that many still wonder why the company doesn’t stick to its original founding day.
Why September 27 Matters
The choice of September 27 as the official “birthday” has always been a quirk of Google’s history. Before settling on this date in 2006, the company experimented with celebrating on September 7, 8, and even 4. The consistency since then has made it a fixture for Doodle watchers and tech historians alike.
Some industry insiders suggest that September 27 marks a symbolic turning point in the company’s early indexing achievements — a moment when Google outpaced competitors like AltaVista and Yahoo to become the most comprehensive search engine available.
Looking Ahead: From Search to AI
The 27th birthday also arrives at a moment when Google is aggressively reshaping itself for the artificial intelligence era. Its Gemini platform, launched in late 2023, has become central to the company’s efforts to integrate AI across search, Workspace, and Android. Analysts note that while Google revolutionized the internet in its first three decades, the next will likely be defined by how it navigates AI competition from Microsoft, OpenAI, and emerging players.
A Journey Worth Celebrating
From an academic project to a household verb, Google’s evolution is a modern business legend. The garage where Page and Brin started now features in Silicon Valley tours, while the company’s Mountain View campus — nicknamed the Googleplex — serves as a symbol of global innovation.
Whether one marks the milestone on September 4 or 27, the occasion remains the same: a chance to recognize the company’s outsized role in shaping digital life.
As the celebrations wound down in Bengaluru, one employee summed it up with a smile: “Every year the cake changes, but the feeling doesn’t. We’re part of a company that changed the way the world thinks about knowledge.”
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