Google’s 27th Birthday: A Celebration of Nostalgia and Innovation
September 27, 2025, marked a milestone for the search giant — Google celebrated its 27th birthday with a special Doodle and a series of reflections on how far the company has come since its modest beginnings. The celebrations evoked nostalgia, honored design heritage, and reminded users of Google’s journey from a garage startup to a tech behemoth.
The Birthday Doodle of Google: A Trip Down Memory Lane
For the 2025 celebration, Google revived its original 1998 logo as the homepage Doodle. That retro design served as a visual reminder of Google’s humble origins and brought back the simplicity and playful charm of its early days. By resurrecting the first wordmark, Google invited users to reflect on its transformation over nearly three decades. (Source: Zee News)
This Doodle also drew attention to one subtle but deliberate design choice: the green “L” in the original logo, which stood out from the primary color scheme. Designers interpret this turn as symbolic — it symbolized Google’s willingness to break conventions, to introduce something unexpected in an otherwise orderly design. (Source: News9Live)
Why Celebrate on September 27?
Interestingly, Google’s birthday celebrated on September 27 is not the same as its legal incorporation date. The company was officially incorporated on September 4, 1998, but over time, the late-September date has become its symbolic annual anniversary. (Source: NDTV)
The adoption of September 27 as the celebration date reportedly began in the mid-2000s and may be linked to internal milestones like significant growth in web indexing. (Source: DNA India) In essence, the date is more symbolic than legal, chosen to commemorate Google’s evolution rather than a strict founding moment.
The Brain Behind the Logo of Google: Ruth Kedar
A highlight of the 27th birthday coverage was the acknowledgment of Ruth Kedar, the designer who created Google’s first logo. A Brazilian-born artist and designer, Kedar was working at Stanford when Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached her to design a visual identity for their project. (Source: LiveMint)
She selected the Catull font for its classical elegance and modern attributes, and chose a color palette with primary hues. But the twist — the green “L” — was intentional, a creative decision meant to indicate that Google would not always follow strict patterns. Her design lingered for many years and has become deeply associated with Google’s brand history. (Sources: Techlusive, LiveMint)
Kedar’s work laid the foundation for future iterations of the Google logo and also inspired the tradition of Google Doodles — playful, artistic reinterpretations of the logo to mark events or anniversaries.
From BackRub to Global Giant
Google’s roots trace back to a Stanford research project named BackRub, which analyzed web links to measure page importance. Over time, that experiment evolved into the search engine we know today. (Source: Economic Times)
The name “Google” is a playful twist on “googol,” the mathematical term for 10^100, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize an almost infinite amount of information. (Source: Economic Times)
In the years since, Google has grown far beyond search: introducing products like Gmail, Maps, Android, YouTube, AI platforms, and cloud services. Its impact now spans across nearly every dimension of digital life. (Source: NDTV)
The Significance of 27
Turning 27 may not carry institutional weight the way 50 or 100 years might, but for Google, it’s an opportunity to pause and reflect. The revival of the original logo, the nod to Ruth Kedar, and the playful Doodle all signal a desire to acknowledge heritage, remind users of the brand’s evolution, and reconnect with the ethos of innovation and creativity that fueled Google’s early years.
In a landscape of constant change — from algorithmic updates to AI, cloud computing, and quantum ambitions — these moments of nostalgia help ground Google’s narrative in its identity: a company built on curiosity, design, and relentless reinvention.