Google’s Birthday: Why the September 27th Celebration Doesn’t Match the Official Incorporation Date of September 4th | Today’s news
“Google’s Birthday” Goes Viral! As the tech giant celebrates its 28th birthday today, September 27, billions of browser users were greeted with a celebratory Google Doodle.
This year, instead of a celebratory artwork, often accompanied by interactive digital confetti or nostalgic Easter eggs, the company opted for a nostalgic throwback with an artwork featuring the very first pre-launch beta version of the Google logo.
But what has piqued the curiosity of tech buffs and history buffs is a small contradiction: Google wasn’t actually founded on September 27th. In fact, the company was officially registered a few weeks earlier, on September 4, 1998.
So why does the world’s most powerful search engine celebrate its birth on a different day?
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Festive 28th birthday Google logo
Google likes to lean on nostalgia on this day. For its 27th birthday in 2025, Google has transported users back to the 1990s by temporarily replacing its modern interface with the original clunky 1998 logo.
Google Birthday Doodle 2026; 1997 Google logo
For its 28th birthday, Google Doodle chose a chunky 3D logo created in 1997, shortly after Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to rename their search engine from “BackRub” to “Google.”
Lacking a graphic designer on the team, the founders created this early digital version themselves using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), a free and open-source image editing software.
The color scheme of this early artwork is also quite different from the iconic Google color scheme we know today.
In this 1997 version, the initial “G” is red, followed by another red/brown “o”, a blue “o”, a green “g”, a square yellow “l”, and a red “e”. It wasn’t until 1998 that the company settled on the now familiar order of blue, red, yellow, blue, green and red.
However, this logo was never widely promoted and was mainly used between September 1997 and September 1998, when the search engine was still in beta and running on Stanford University servers.
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Google’s legal birthday
In 1995, PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford University. Technical geniuses
Before their “railroad start” revolutionized a search engine that ranked websites based on backlinks, they disagreed on almost everything during their first meeting.
The project was originally called “BackRub” and was later renamed “Google” – a playful misspelling of “googol”, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
In August 1998, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote the duo a check for $100,000. This key seed investment allowed them to move operations out of their dorm rooms and officially incorporate Google Inc. on September 4, 1998.
From a legal and historical point of view, September 4th is the true anniversary of the company.
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Why was Google’s birthday moved to September 27?
During its early years, Google was amazingly inconsistent about when it blew out its birthday candles. Depending on the year, the festive birthday holiday logo appeared on various dates, including September 7th, September 8th, and September 26th.
A permanent shift to September 27 occurred in the middle of the 21st century. This change is closely related to a major internal milestone in 2005, when Google entered an “index size war” with then formidable rival Yahoo.
To assert its dominance, Google announced that it had indexed a record number of websites, greatly expanding its searchable universe and beating the competition. This massive announcement was coupled with a birthday celebration on September 27th.
Since then, the date has stuck. Since 2006, Google has officially celebrated September 27 as its celebrated birthday.
Today, the date serves less as a strict legal anniversary and more as a symbolic celebration of the search engine’s monumental scale, rapid growth, and global impact.
A fitting birthday
While September 4th is the day the foundational documents were signed, September 27th marks the day Google demonstrated its unique ability to index information from around the world.
This record-breaking milestone changed the Internet forever, and September 27th became a fitting day for billions of users to wish the search giant a happy birthday.
