Google’s 25th Birthday! Today’s Doodle celebrates Google’s 25th year
Google’s 25th birthday is being honored with today’s Doodle. While we want to think ahead at Google, birthdays may be a sobering opportunity for introspection. Let’s reminisce about our birth stories from 25 years ago…
Sergey Brin and Larry Page met as fellow graduate students in the computer science department at Stanford University in the late 1990s. They quickly realised they had a common goal: to make the Internet more user-friendly. The two of them spent many hours in their dorm room working on a search engine prototype. After some significant development, they relocated to Google’s first office, a rented garage. Incorporated as Google on September 27th, 1998.
Although our logo has evolved significantly since 1998 (and is featured in today’s Doodle), the overall goal of improving people’s access to and understanding of the world’s information has stayed the same. Google is used for practically everything by billions of people around the world.
We appreciate your 25 years of growth and change alongside our own. Together, we are excited to explore what the future holds.
“How do you cut a pineapple?”
It wasn’t that long ago when finding the answers to simple questions like this wasn’t all that simple. You might call a friend or family member who was handy in the kitchen, or hope that a cookbook at home had some instructions. Or, unsure of where to look for the answer at all, you’d just grab a kitchen knife and do your best.
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Twenty-five years ago we launched Google Search to help you find answers to questions big and small. Since then, billions of people have turned to our products to do just that — to satisfy their curiosity. To start a business. To start a journey. To cut a pineapple.
As Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote earlier this month, it’s an enormous privilege to reach this milestone — and we haven’t done it alone. We may be a technology company, but Google is what it is today because of people: Our employees, our partners, and most importantly, all the people who use our products.
So as we celebrate our 25th birthday today, we’re also celebrating 25 years of your curiosity. After all, your curiosity is what has fueled us — and our progress. Consider that in 2000 so many people rushed to Google seeking photos of Jennifer Lopez’s daring Grammy’s dress that it became the most popular search query. That search returned 10 blue links, but no green dress. So our engineers went to work, brainstorming new ways to index images alongside webpages and Google Images was born, enabling you to find that one photo you’re in search of faster than ever before.
Over the past quarter century, Google has gone through this cycle many times. Every part of our narrative has been shaped by you, whether you’re interested in tying the perfect tie, finding the perfect wedding venue, maintaining your health, or being informed.
We’re turning 25, and to mark the occasion, we’ll be throwing the kinds of parties you’ve come to anticipate from us over the years. Search for (or hum) birthday-related questions today, and you might get a small surprise on our homepage doodle as we celebrate the history of the Google logo. Above all, we hope to express our gratitude.
Seeing what people like you have accomplished with technology is what keeps us constantly motivated to think of innovative new uses for it. We’re also awed by the prospects lying in wait for us and the ways in which AI might aid us in fulfilling our purpose and expanding our impact. Sundar predicted that “our search for answers will drive extraordinary technology progress over the next 25 years.” We can’t wait to work with you to shape the future.
Thank you for an incredible 25 years from everyone at Google. Cheers to staying curious for a very long time!
Search in your language
Back in 1998, Google started as an English-only service. From the start, we knew that helping people all around the world meant we would need to expand it to their languages. So within two years, we were operating in 14 languages including Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. With this expansion, more people could search for content in their preferred language. In fact, just adding these four Asian languages made Search available for 75 million web pages in Asian languages for internet users around the world.
But that was just the beginning of our journey in Asia Pacific. When we opened our first office outside the US in Tokyo in 2001, we knew it would become a base to get to know the region better — and for us to improve our products for the people of Asia Pacific. And as we continued to add languages to Search (40+ Asian languages and counting), we saw an opportunity to expand on the results as well. While information in English is widely available online, in other languages it can be difficult to find. Thanks to advances in neural machine learning translation, in 2017 we launched a feature in India to help people access web pages originally written in other languages and read it in their preferred language.
