Google Doodle celebrates 25th birthday today, but what was the first Google Doodle?

Google is celebrating its 25th birthday today, on September 27, 2023. As this American multinational technology company turns 25 and crosses this significant milestone, it celebrates its 25 years of existence through a special Google Doodle.

How Google was born

• Google was founded by two students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who met each other at Stanford University while they were both pursuing a computer science program in the 1990s.

• Google was founded on September 4, 1998, and it was on September 27, 1998, that Google Inc. was officially born.

• They worked from their dorm rooms and built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.

• Later, this search engine was renamed as Google.

What was the first Google Doodle?

• A Google Doodle is a unique, temporary alteration of Google's logo on Google's homepages intended to mark holidays, events, achievements, and notable historical figures.
• The first Google Doodle was created in 1998, and the concept of the doodle was born when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin played around with the corporate logo that showcased that they were attending the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada Desert, USA, in August 1998.
• Design of the first Google Doodle: They placed a stick figure drawing behind the 2nd “O” in the word, Google, and the revised logo was intended as a message to Google users that the founders were "out of the office."

• Since then, users loved to see the playful logo, and it was well-received. The idea of creating a fun logo and decorating it during notable events, holidays, and anniversaries became a trend.

• In 2000, Larry and Sergey asked Dennis Hwang, who was an intern at the time, to design a doodle for Bastille Day. The doodle got so popular among the users that Dennis Hwang was appointed as Google's chief doodler. And Google Doodles started showing up more frequently on Google's homepage. Dennis Hwang is the current webmaster.

The demand for doodles has risen over the years. Creating doodles is the responsibility of a team of illustrators (or doodlers) and engineers, and so far, they have created over 5000 doodles for Google's homepages around the world.