Google is celebrating its birthday. The search engine celebrates this Sunday, September 27, 2026, its 28 years with a Doodle that recovers part of the aesthetics of its early years. However, anyone looking into the history of the company will quickly discover a peculiarity: Google was not born on September 27. Its official constitution took place on September 4, 1998, and the domain google.com had been registered since September 15, 1997. Even the company itself admits that there is no single and indisputable date to mark the beginning of its history.
The explanation lies in the numerous milestones that accumulated during the early years of the project created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The search engine began to take shape when both were studying at Stanford University, before becoming a formal company. Google later summarized that history by acknowledging that "the exact date" of its foundation remains a subject of debate even within the company itself. The only thing that has ended up being fixed is the celebration: for two decades, September 27 serves as its symbolic birthday.
Google was officially born on September 4, 1998
If strictly business criteria are used, the birthday should be celebrated on September 4. On that day in 1998, Google Inc. was formally established after Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim handed Page and Brin a check for $100,000 to finance the project. The new company ended up setting up in a garage in Menlo Park owned by Susan Wojcicki, who years later would become one of Google's first employees and subsequently the CEO of YouTube.
But that was not really the first important date either. The domain google.com had been registered on September 15, 1997, almost twelve months before Google Inc. existed as a corporation. Page and Brin had been working on their search engine for even longer, whose predecessor was a university project called BackRub, developed since 1996 to analyze the relationships between web pages.
That is why at least three possible "births" can be found: the beginning of the university project, the registration of the domain, and the legal constitution of the company. Google ended up choosing a fourth date.
So, why September 27?
The most accurate answer is that Google decided to make that day a tradition, but there is no foundational event that occurred exactly on September 27, 1998 that alone explains the choice. The company acknowledged in 2018 that Google Inc. was created on September 4, but added that it had been celebrating its birthday on the 27th for "more than a decade" through one of its traditional Doodles.
A Google spokesperson explained years ago that there were so many possible dates during September that the company ended up considering practically the entire month as its "birthday month." Among the options were the day of incorporation, the hiring of the first employee, or the registration of google.com. According to that explanation, there is no single historical reason that makes the 27th a more correct date than the others.
There is a theory that has been repeated for years. In 2005, Google coincided the celebrations of its seventh anniversary with the announcement of a huge expansion of its web page index: the search engine claimed then that its index was 1,000 times larger than the original and more than three times larger than any competitor. Different historical reconstructions suggest that the company moved its celebrations from late September to accompany that milestone, although Google has never officially established that this is the definitive reason why the 27th ended up prevailing.
Google celebrated its birthday on four different dates
The confusion increases when reviewing the first Doodles. Google has moved its anniversary over different years. The first Doodle expressly dedicated to its birthday appeared on September 27, 2002, when it celebrated four years. The following year it chose September 8; in 2004 it did so on the 7th and in 2005 it moved the celebration to the 26th. Since 2006, September 27 has been established as the usual date.
The company itself has occasionally joked about this lack of precision. For a company whose original mission was precisely to organize world information, Google has surprisingly kept one of the simplest questions about itself open: what exactly is its birthday.
From BackRub to Google
The story began long before the name became one of the most recognized on the internet. Page and Brin initially developed a system to rank pages using their links as an indicator of relevance. That university search engine, called BackRub, evolved into Google, a name inspired by "googol", the mathematical term used to represent a one followed by one hundred zeros.
The definitive domain arrived in September 1997 and the company was established a year later. In its early months, Google operated with computers installed in a garage and servers partially built with Lego pieces. The first Doodle also appeared before the official incorporation: Page and Brin placed a figure from the Burning Man festival in 1998 within the logo to indicate that they were out of the office.
Since that university project, Google has ended up being part of a much broader tech group. The search engine remains one of its main products, but around it have developed Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, YouTube, Google Cloud, and, more recently, the artificial intelligence ecosystem of Gemini.
A Doodle to celebrate 28 years
This Sunday, Google continues the tradition and celebrates 28 years since 1998 with a special modification of its logo. The company already used September 27, 2023, to commemorate its 25th anniversary and to recall the graphic evolution that the search engine had experienced since its early versions.
The choice may seem strange, but it is already part of the company's history. Google was legally born on September 4, 1998, google.com has existed since September 15, 1997, and yet, it blows out the candles every September 27. Not because there is a specific act on that day marking its foundation, but because a changing celebration ended up becoming, over the years, the de facto official date of its birthday.