Google turns 25! Tech giant celebrates its birthday with hidden surprises, Easter eggs and its iconic spinner

In September 1998, Google was founded in a garage by two Stanford University students – humble beginnings, to say the least.

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

To mark its 25th anniversary, Google has packed its site with Easter Eggs, including a new Google Doodle – a temporary change to the logo – with ’25’ instead of where the two Os would normally be.

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

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

The Google Birthday Surprise Spinner picks an interactive game for users to play from the search engine’s archives

If you search for “Google birthday surprise spinner,” the multi-colored carnival wheel will appear 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 has that too published a gallery of 25 changes created for its search product since 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 past quarter century, aided by artificial intelligence (AI).

Search Google “how to cut a pineapple” in 1998 and you might be brought up with a few sites, but do that today and you’ll be bombarded with a slew of images, how-to videos, recipes and more.

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

“We love thinking of new ways technology can help you every day, and are endlessly inspired by what you’ve achieved with it,” it says.

“We are also humbled by the opportunities that await us, 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.

Search Google ‘how to cut a pineapple’ in 1998 and you might get a few websites

But enter the same question today and you’ll be flooded with images, explainer videos, blog posts, recipes and more

“From all of us at Google, thank you for an amazing 25 years. Here’s to many more years of curiosity.’

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

Google was officially launched in September 1998 by Stanford University’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search.

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

Their search project was originally called BackRub – a questionable choice – but luckily it was changed to the now world-famous name before launch.

“Google” is a misspelling of the word googol, 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 paperwork to form the company was actually filed on September 4, 1998.

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

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

Online innovations subsequently launched include Google Maps, Google Street View and Google Earth, as well as the Chrome web browser, the Gmail email service and the Google Meet videoconferencing platform.

Google founders Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin (right) in their first office, Susan Wojcicki’s garage, in 1999

Google Beta: What the billion-dollar company’s world-famous search function looked like 25 years ago

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

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

The first official Google phone – the Google Pixel – was released in 2016, but before that it collaborated with HTC on the Nexus One.

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

Meanwhile, Google Glass, released in 2013, was one of the first smart glasses on the market, bringing information right to people’s eyes.