Going strong at 25 - we wish you many happy returns, Google

Search engine thanks users for 'evolving with them over the past 25 years’

California, US (Web Desk) - It's Google's 25th birthday, and the company is pulling out all the stops. 

First incorporated in 1998, Google turned a quarter of a century on Wednesday. 

Google has also created a special Google Doodle for its birthday - a temporary alteration of Google's regular logo that the search engine does for different holidays, events or to honour notable individuals. 

The birthday Google Doodle honours Google's logo evolution, from the first-ever logo to its current iteration, with a special 25th birthday logo at the end. 

Google was incorporated on Sept 4, 1998, but the company began celebrating its anniversary on Sept 27 in 2005 after an announcement that it was shifting away from how pages it had indexed. 

How it all started? 

The first Google Doodle came not long after Google. It was simple – a stick man over the search engine's logo in 1998 when co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took time off to attend Burning Man Festival. 

Since then, there have been more than 5,000 unique Google Doodles created, from Valentine's Day to the anniversary of the ice cream sundae in 2011. Now, a team of engineers and illustrators, called doodlers, are responsible for the various Google Doodles.

“While here at Google we’re oriented towards the future, birthdays can also be a time to reflect,” it said in a blogpost. 

Doctoral students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who met in Stanford University’s computer science programme in the late 90s, shared a similar vision: make the World Wide Web a more accessible place.

The pair worked tirelessly from their dorm rooms to develop a prototype for a better search engine. As they made meaningful progress on the project, they moved the operation to Google’s first office - a rented garage. On Sept 27, 1998, Google Inc. was officially born, the blogpost reads. 

Emphasising that much has changed since 1998 - including its logo as seen in today’s Doodle - Google said that its mission has remained the same: “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

Thanking users for “evolving with them over the past 25 years”, it added, ”We can’t wait to see where the future takes us, together.”