Google Celebrates Its 25th Birthday with Hidden Surprises, Easter Eggs, and Its Iconic Spinner

In September 1998, two Stanford University students created Google in a garage—a humble beginning, to say the least.

Who would have thought a quarter of a century later that it would be the most used search engine in the world with unprecedented access to our personal data?

To mark its 25th birthday, Google has filled its site with Easter eggs, including a new Google Doodle (a temporary alteration of its logo) with ’25’ instead of where the two O’s would normally be.

Meanwhile, if you type “Google’s 25th birthday” into the search bar, colorful confetti will rain down on your results.

The tech giant has also brought back its ‘surprise birthday spinner’, which lets you play interactive games from its archives, including Pac-man, Snake and Tic-tac-toe.

Searching for ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’ will bring up the multi-coloured carnival wheel at the top of the search results.

It will automatically start spinning and select a game for you, although you can choose to spin again if you want to play something else.

Google also has published a gallery of 25 changes made to its search product since its launch, including Images in 2001, Voice Search in 2006, and Lens in 2017.

And a new video shows how search capabilities have evolved over the last quarter century, assisted by artificial intelligence (AI).

Google “how to cut a pineapple” in 1998 and it might give you a few sites, but if you do it today, you’ll be inundated with tons of images, how-to videos, recipes, and more.

in a blog entry Today, Google thanked the public for “25 years of curiosity” that has fueled the company’s astonishing success.

“We love coming up with new ways that technology can be useful to you every day, and we’re endlessly inspired by what you’ve used it for,” he says.

‘We are also humbled by the opportunities ahead and the potential of AI to help us continue to deliver on our mission and improve the lives of even more people around the world.

‘On behalf of all of us at Google, thank you for these incredible 25 years. Here’s to many more years of curiosity.’

Although it is now a multibillion-dollar company and owner of the world’s dominant web search engine, Google’s origins were much more modest.

Google was officially launched in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University to commercialize Google Search.

The duo used Susan Wojcicki’s (now known as the former CEO of YouTube) garage in California as their first office.

Their search project was originally called BackRub (a questionable choice), but fortunately it was changed to its now world-famous name before launch.

‘Google’ is a misspelling of the word googol, which is a term for the number one followed by a hundred zeros (as die-hard fans of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ will probably know).

Although Google celebrated its birthday on September 27, the documents to incorporate the company were filed on September 4, 1998.

The company was incorporated three days later and the domain was registered on September 15, so it is unclear why it is now celebrating today’s date.

Originally, Google was a single-product company with only Google Search in its name, but now its hardware and software seem to permeate every corner of our lives.

Subsequently launched online innovations include Google Maps, Google Street View and Google Earth, as well as its Chrome web browser, the Gmail email service and the Google Meet video conferencing platform.

Its Android operating system is one of the two dominant software for today’s smartphones (along with Apple’s iOS).

But unlike iOS, Android runs on phones made by several companies, including Samsung, Xiaomi, Nothing, and Google itself.

Google’s first official phone, the Google Pixel, was launched in 2016, although it previously collaborated with HTC on the Nexus One.

Google even has a physical presence in our living rooms thanks to the smart speaker products in its Google Nest range, powered by the Google Assistant.

Meanwhile, Google Glass, launched in 2013, was one of the first smart glasses on the market and put information right in front of people’s eyes.