When Is Google’s Real Birthday? 🎂
Chances are, you’ve come across a Google “doodle” — those quirky little graphics or animations around the search bar on Google.com that mark important anniversaries and global events. You might even have spotted one celebrating Google’s own birthday. If so, you most likely saw it on September 27, the date Google has chosen to commemorate its founding.
But here’s the twist: Google didn’t actually launch on September 27.
The story begins earlier. The now world-famous Google.com domain was officially registered on September 15, 1997. That was technically the first day someone could “google something” — a phrase that would later become a household verb. Still, at that point, the search engine was part of a Stanford research project led by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the public wouldn’t gain access to the site until early 1998.
Also in 1998, Google officially became a company. Its date of incorporation was September 4, marking the day Larry Page and Sergey Brin formally transformed their research project into a business.
With so many important milestones happening in September, it raises a natural question: why does Google celebrate its birthday on the 27th?
Google’s Self-Declared Birthday: September 27
It is a symbolic decision, made by company leadership in 2005. That year, on September 27, tech journalist John Battelle reported that Google had indexed a record-breaking 24 billion web pages, surpassing its closest rival at the time, Microsoft’s MSN Search. Since then, Google has officially marked September 27 as its birthday.
Of course, the milestones did not stop there. In May 2011, Google became the first website in history to reach one billion monthly active users. Fast-forward to January 2020, and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., entered the history books as the fourth company in the world to achieve a $1 trillion market cap. Today, Alphabet’s market capitalization sits just under $3 trillion.
What began as a doctoral research project at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin has turned into one of the most influential companies in modern history. Both founders are now centibillionaires—Page with an estimated net worth of $205 billion, and Brin close behind at $190 billion.
Whether the company chooses to mark its birthday on September 4, 15, or 27, one fact is undeniable: Google made every September milestone count.
