Google's 28th Birthday, and the Logo They Drew Themselves in 1997

Today Google is celebrating its 28th birthday, and the Doodle it chose for the occasion has a story that is rarely told.

The logo in today's Doodle is not the logo you know now. What appears is the chunky 3D logo from 1997, back when Larry Page and Sergey Brin had just renamed their search engine from BackRub to Google. That was a long time ago, but picking that logo today was exactly the right call.

About the logo itself, one detail is worth noting. There was no graphic designer on the team at the time. That chunky 3D logo was made by Page and Brin themselves, using GIMP, a free and open-source image editor. The branding strategy was brilliant; the graphics were decidedly a weekend project.

This detail is on the official Doodle page, doodles.google/doodle/googles-birthday-2026, which also runs a short trivia quiz. The full Doodle archive lives at doodles.google.

From BackRub to Google

The origin of the name is still interesting. Their first search engine was called BackRub, named after how it worked: analysing backlinks to decide how important a web page was.

The name was later changed. A Stanford graduate student named Sean Anderson suggested "googolplex" during a brainstorming session. Page shortened it to "googol", the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. When Anderson went to check whether the domain was available, he typed it wrong, writing google.com instead of googol.com. Page liked the mistaken version better, and the domain was registered on 15 September 1997.

The name is not an accident. The mission they wrote for themselves still opens the company's official page, and it reads in full at google.com/about/our-story.

Two different dates people often mix up

One thing causes more confusion than it should: Google's birthday is not the same as its official founding date.

• 4 September 1998 — Google Inc. was legally incorporated
• 27 September 1998 — the founding was announced publicly, alongside the first Doodle

The birthday has always been celebrated on 27 September, because that is when the public first learned Google existed. So if you count and find a mismatch, you are not miscounting. They are simply two different dates.

The first Doodle was not for an occasion

The first Doodle, on 30 August 1998, was made for a much more casual reason. The whole team was at Burning Man, so they put an out-of-office message up to let visitors know the servers were fine and only the staff was missing.

Doodles grew out of that into one of Google's best-known traditions, and birthdays became an annual fixture.

A tradition that keeps delivering

The rarest detail worth mentioning: by the time of the 21st birthday Doodle, Google was already answering queries in more than 100 languages. For the 25th, the homepage logo turned its two letter o's into the number 25, written G25gle. Small, consistent, and very Google.

Why looking backwards works

In an industry that constantly competes to launch the next product, celebrating an anniversary by looking backwards has its own value. The logo they drew themselves in GIMP, the name that came from a typo, the first Doodle that was really just an out-of-office message. Those small details are what make the enormous parts feel real.

Last year, the 27th birthday Doodle went all the way back to the 1998 logo. This year the choice goes further back still, to 1997.

Nobody knows what Google will pick next year. But one thing is certain: the birthday Doodle will keep coming, and the full archive is worth a look at doodles.google.