By Arpita Ghosh

Copyright timesnownews

Google is celebrating its 27th birthday with a special Doodle featuring the company’s first-ever logo from 1998. The vintage design offers a nostalgic look back at the company’s early days and highlights how far Google has come since its beginnings as a small research project in a garage. Founded in 1998, Google’s mission has always been to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The birthday Doodle not only revisits Google’s past but also points to the future, encouraging users to explore the company’s latest technologies, including its newest AI innovations, the company said. From a Garage to the Googleplex: The Story of Google Google’s journey began in 1995 at Stanford University, where Larry Page, considering graduate school, met Sergey Brin, a student assigned to show him around campus. Accounts suggest the two disagreed on almost everything during their first meeting, but within a year, they had formed a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they created a search engine called Backrub, which ranked web pages by the importance of their links. The following year, Backrub was renamed Google – a play on the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google quickly attracted attention from the academic community and Silicon Valley investors. In August 1998, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to Page and Brin, officially launching Google Inc. The team moved from dorm rooms to a garage in Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki, employee No. 16 and future YouTube CEO. Early office life included clunky desktops, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpeting. The company’s unconventional approach extended to its first server, built from Lego, and the first “Google Doodle” in 1998, a stick figure added to the logo to signal that the staff was attending the Burning Man Festival. The motto “Don’t be evil” reflected the company’s early culture. As Google grew, it expanded rapidly, hiring engineers, building a sales team, and welcoming its first company dog, Yoshka. The company outgrew the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View. Today, Google operates hundreds of products used by billions worldwide, including Gmail, YouTube, Android, and Google Search. While the Lego servers are gone, and the company has added a few more dogs, the drive to build accessible technology remains central – from the dorm room, to the garage, to the Googleplex. Get Latest News live on Times Now along with Breaking News and Top Headlines from Technology Science and around the world.