Rahul Somvanshi
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Google Turns 28: Why It Celebrates on September 27—Not Its Actual Founding Date
If you clicked on Google’s homepage Doodle today, you are part of a tradition the company has been running since the mid-2000s, consistently from around 2006. But Google’s regular birthday celebration on September 27 is not the date it was incorporated—and the real founding story is stranger than most people know.
Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford PhD students who had been running a search engine project out of their dorm rooms before moving into a rented garage in Menlo Park, California—the home of Susan Wojcicki, who later became YouTube’s CEO. Google began using September 27 as its birthday celebration date in the mid-2000s, settling on it consistently around 2006, choosing a date that marked a milestone in the volume of web pages its index had reached.
The first major outside investment arrived before the company had even been formally registered. Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to “Google Inc.” after a brief demonstration by Page and Brin in August 1998. The check sat uncashed for weeks because the corporate entity did not yet legally exist.
From BackRub and One Garage to a $4 Trillion Parent Company
The original search project ran under a different name: BackRub, a reference to the algorithm’s method of analyzing back-links to determine a webpage’s relevance and authority. Page and Brin renamed the project Google—a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100—to reflect their ambition to organize vast quantities of information. The PageRank algorithm that BackRub pioneered became the technical foundation of Google’s early dominance.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has grown into a global enterprise with a market capitalization exceeding $4 trillion. The contrast with a garage operation running on borrowed computers and an uncashed $100,000 check is genuinely large.
The 28th birthday also marks something that has no parallel in the company’s history: research tracking AI Overview appearances in Google Search shows they now appear in a significant portion of general informational queries, driving up zero-click search rates. The technology that made Google what it is—linking people to web pages—is increasingly being supplemented by the technology Google itself is now betting on to stay relevant. The nostalgic Doodle and the architectural change happening underneath it arrived in the same news cycle.
Why does Google celebrate its birthday on September 27?
Although Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, the company began using September 27 as its regular birthday celebration date around 2005, settling on it consistently from 2006. The date was selected to coincide with an announcement of a milestone in the number of web pages its search engine indexed, and the tradition has remained every year since.
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