The world's most popular search engine and technology giant, Google, celebrates its 25th birthday today. To mark the occasion, Google released a nostalgic doodle showing how its logo has evolved over the past 25 years.
The doodle features an animated GIF that changes the logo from "Google" to "G25gle," a nod to the tech giant's 25th anniversary. Clicking on the doodle triggers virtual confetti on the page.
Google wrote in a blog post:
25 years ago, we launched Google Search to help you find answers to questions big and small. Since then, billions of people have used our products to satisfy their curiosity. To start a business. Start a journey. Cut the pineapple.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai marked the milestone birthday in a blog post last month and expressed his gratitude to the people and partners who have contributed to the company's innovation over the past quarter-century.
We're honored to reach this milestone thanks to the people who use our products and challenge us to keep innovating, to the thousands of Googlers past and present who contribute their talents to building these products, and to partners who believe in our mission as much as we do.
On September 4, 1998, two PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google. The company was officially registered as Google on September 27, 1998. For the first seven years, Google celebrated its birthday on September 4, but later decided to move the celebrations to September 27 to coincide with the news that the search engine had indexed a record number of web pages.
Over the years, Google has continued to expand its services to include Gmail, Docs, and Maps. The company also acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion. According to Statista, YouTube is valued at nearly $30 billion, while Google's current market capitalization is $1.65 trillion.