You probably saw it. Sometime on September 27th, you opened a browser tab and there it was: a ghost from the internet’s past. The old, slightly clumsy, multi-colored Google logo from 1998, complete with an exclamation point, looking almost quaint on our sleek 2025 screens. A simple doodle to mark an anniversary. Happy birthday Google, you’re 27.
But it was more than that, wasn't it?
For a moment, that logo wasn't just a corporate throwback. It was a time machine. It pulled us back to an era of dial-up tones, of unwieldy CRT monitors, of an internet that felt like a vast, uncharted frontier. When I saw that wonderfully clunky, almost naive 1998 logo return for the day, I honestly felt a jolt. It was a visceral reminder of the starting line. The moment a wild idea, born in the dorm rooms of Stanford, began to reshape not just how we find information, but how we think, how we connect, and how we dream.
The official message was simple enough: "Thank you for searching with us throughout the years!" But the real message was written in the code of the last two and a half decades. It’s a story about two Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who in 1995 had a radical idea. At the time, search engines ranked pages by how often a search term appeared. It was a clumsy, easily manipulated system. Their project, initially nicknamed "Backrub," proposed something revolutionary: what if a page’s importance was determined by how many other important pages linked to it?
It was a system built on reputation, on connection, on the web's own collective intelligence. This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. They weren't just cataloging data; they were trying to understand meaning.
The Garage That Mapped the World—And What It's Building Next
From a Garage to a Googol
It’s easy to forget how audacious their mission statement was: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Think about that. In 1998, working out of a garage in Menlo Park—a garage rented from Susan Wojcicki, who would become employee #16—they set out to do something on a scale that was, frankly, absurd. They named their company after a "googol"—which, in simpler terms, is a one followed by a hundred zeros—to signify the sheer scale of the information they intended to wrangle.
The early days feel like tech folklore now. Building their first server rack out of Lego bricks because it was cheap and expandable. The first Google Doodle being a stick figure to let people know they’d skipped work to go to the Burning Man festival. The first seed funding, a $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, written out to "Google Inc." before the company even officially existed.
People often ask me, "So when is Google's birthday, really?" and the answer is beautifully messy. The company was incorporated on September 4th, 1998. But for years now, the celebration has landed on September 27th, a date chosen to align with the anniversary of a major milestone in the number of pages their engine had indexed. It’s a perfect detail, isn’t it? They don’t celebrate their corporate birth, but the birth of their expanding capability.
And this simple act of looking back is a profound reminder of the sheer velocity of the last quarter-century—a period where we went from dial-up modems and clunky desktops to carrying the entire corpus of human knowledge in our pockets, a transformation so total it’s almost impossible to fully grasp. The term "Google" became a verb. It became the default starting point for curiosity itself. This wasn't just an iteration; it was a paradigm shift on par with the printing press. Before Gutenberg, knowledge was siloed, accessible only to a select few. The press democratized access. In a similar way, Google democratized inquiry.
Of course, with that power comes immense responsibility. The company’s early, informal motto was "Don't be evil," a simple phrase that has become infinitely more complex as Google, now a cornerstone of the larger Alphabet Inc., has grown to touch every facet of our digital lives, from our email to our maps to the operating systems in our hands. Navigating that responsibility is the defining challenge of our age.
But today, on the occasion of the Google 27th birthday, I want to focus on the trajectory. That nostalgic logo isn't just a marker of how far we've come. It is a launchpad for imagining where we are going next.
The first 27 years were about organizing the world’s existing information. It was about indexing, linking, and retrieving. It was a monumental task of digital cartography, mapping the known universe of human output. We are now standing on the cusp of a new era. The next 27 years won’t just be about finding what’s already there. They will be about using that vast repository of knowledge as a foundation for creation.
What happens when the search bar doesn’t just give you a list of links, but helps you synthesize a new idea? What happens when our tools for inquiry become our partners in invention? We are moving from a world of information access to a world of intelligence augmentation. This is the next great frontier. The questions we ask are about to change, because the nature of the answers we can receive is fundamentally shifting.
So as we look at that 1998 logo, let’s not just feel nostalgia for a simpler time. Let’s feel the raw, unbridled, garage-level excitement of a project just beginning. Because in the grand scheme of things, it is.
The Search Has Just Begun
The first era of the internet was about putting a library in everyone's pocket. The next will be about putting a genius collaborator on every desk. We've spent 27 years learning how to ask the right questions. We're about to spend the next 27 creating answers the world has never seen before. The scale of what's coming will make the last two decades look like a practice run.
Reference article source：
- Google's 27th Birthday Meaning: What does Google stand for, who is its creator and who is its owner now?
- Google celebrates 27th birthday with nostalgic first logo
- Google turns 27 today: Why the search engine celebrates its birthday today? Check special, nostalgic Doodle
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