Google’s 28th anniversary: Retro doodle honours Stanford origins and 'BackRub' legacy

The concept of the Google Doodle originated in August 1998, when company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin drew a simple stick figure behind the second 'o' in the corporate logo. The improvised graphic served as a light-hearted "out of office" message to notify users that the founders were away attending the Burning Man festival in Nevada. What began as a functional status update quickly evolved into an enduring digital tradition. Over twenty-eight years, Google has produced thousands of customised homepage artworks to commemorate historic achievements, global cultural figures, and major company milestones.

Why Google Celebrates on 27 September

Although Larry Page and Sergey Brin formally incorporated Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 after securing a $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the tech giant officially marks its birthday on 27 September. The company aligned its annual celebrations with 27 September starting in 2006. The date selection commemorated the day Google announced a record-breaking expansion of its web search index, officially dropping the counter from its homepage to reflect a massive leap in processing capacity over rival engines.

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The 28th Birthday Doodle and Garage Origins

To mark its 28th birthday on Sunday, 27 September 2026, Google introduced a nostalgic homepage Doodle showcasing its original 1998 logo alongside an interactive historical trivia quiz. The retrospective artwork honours the search engine's humble origins as a Stanford University research project initially named "BackRub". The company eventually adopted the name "Google" after student Sean Anderson accidentally misspelt the mathematical term "googol," which denotes the number one followed by 100 zeros, creating a happy accident that transformed a typographical mistake into a global brand.