If you went online in 1998, you probably did it through a screeching 56k modem and a copy of Netscape Navigator, and you found things using AltaVista or Yahoo. Search was a mess. Results were ranked largely on how often a page repeated your keywords, so the spammiest site usually won. Then a plain white page with one text box turned up and quietly flattened everybody.
Google turns 28 today. The odd thing is that its most playful feature is actually older than the company.
Two Stanford Students and a Pile of Lego
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995, and by 1996 they were running a search engine called BackRub on the university network. The name gave away the big idea. Instead of counting keywords, it looked at the links pointing at a page and treated each one as a vote, with votes from important pages carrying more weight. That became PageRank, and it's the reason Google's results felt so much smarter than anything else around.
The hardware was pure student improvisation. One of their early storage units sat in an enclosure built from Lego bricks, packed with 4GB hard drives, while the crawler chewed through a worrying share of Stanford's bandwidth.
They renamed the project Google, a play on googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeros), and registered google.com on 15 September 1997. Brin made the first logo himself in GIMP, the free image editor, and you can see the result below. Chunky, tilted and unmistakably homemade.
In August 1998, Sun cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim handed them a cheque for $100,000 made out to Google Inc. The problem? Google Inc. didn't exist. They had to incorporate just to bank it, which they did on 4 September 1998, setting up shop in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park. The birthday bounced between a few dates in the early years before Google settled on 27 September.
The Out of Office Note That Started It All
A week before incorporation, Page and Brin headed to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. They needed a simple way to warn users that nobody was minding the servers, so they tucked a little stick figure behind the second O of the logo. That was 30 August 1998. The first Google Doodle beat Google Inc. into the world by days.
Doodles stayed occasional until 2000, when the founders asked an intern named Dennis Hwang to draw something for Bastille Day. It was the first doodle aimed at a specific country, and Hwang went on to become the resident doodler for years. That same year brought a five day story about aliens hauling the logo off to Mars, plus the first animated doodle at Halloween.
When the Logo Became a Game
For anyone reading this site, the big one landed on 21 May 2010. To mark the 30th birthday of Pac Man, Google turned its logo into a playable maze with the arcade's original ghost behaviour and sound. Hit the insert coin button twice and a second player joined as Ms. Pac Man. It was the first interactive game doodle, and it proved so popular that Google gave it a permanent home. One productivity firm reckoned it swallowed nearly five million hours of office time on launch day.
After that, the team kept raising the bar. Les Paul got a guitar you could actually record on in 2011, and Robert Moog got a working synthesizer a year later. By 2014 you could sit and solve a fully working Rubik's Cube right there on the homepage.
Here's how the big firsts stack up.
- 1998Burning Man
A stick figure behind the second O. The very first doodle, and really just a note saying back soon.
- 2000Aliens and Bastille Day
The first multi day doodle story arrives in May, then the first doodle made for one country in July.
- 2000Halloween
Flickering jack o'lantern O's and a spider make this the first animated doodle.
- 2005Doodle 4 Google
The student design contest starts right here in the UK before going worldwide.
- 2009Water on the Moon
The first doodle drawn and launched on the same day as the news broke.
- 2010Pac Man's 30th
The first playable doodle, complete with a hidden two player mode.
- 2011Charlie Chaplin
The first live action doodle, starring the doodle team themselves.
- 2012Robert Moog
A playable analogue style synth with a four track recorder built in.
- 2014Rubik's Cube
A fully working 3D cube for the puzzle's 40th anniversary.
- 2016Magic Cat Academy
Momo the cat fights ghosts with mouse gestures. She's now the most recurring doodle character, named after a real team pet.
- 2017Coding for Carrots
The first coding doodle, celebrating 50 years of programming languages for kids.
- 2018Georges Méliès
The first VR and 360 video doodle. It picked up an Emmy nomination.
- 2019Johann Sebastian Bach
The first AI powered doodle harmonises any melody you write in Bach's style.
- 2021Champion Island Games
A full 16 bit style sports RPG for the Tokyo Olympics and the largest multiplayer doodle yet.
- 2026Happy 28th
Well over 5,000 doodles later, the logo is still getting broken on purpose.
The most ambitious of the lot is still Champion Island. It's a proper 16 bit style adventure with side quests, rival teams and a full map to wander, and it still plays in your browser today.
Why the Doodles Still Matter
The formula hasn't really changed in 28 years. Take the most recognisable logo on the web and mess with it. For a retro crowd there's something very familiar about that. The best doodles feel like a good demoscene intro or a shareware splash screen: a small team cramming as much personality as possible into a tiny, fixed space.
Not bad for something that started as a sign on the door saying gone to the desert.