Google 25th birthday: Google celebrates its 25th birthday - what is the Google Birthday Surprise Spinner?

Search engine giant Google turns 25 years old today (Wednesday, September 27). By far the most popular search engine, Google registers around 99,000 searches a second, and 8.5 billion every day.

To celebrate its birthday, Google has launched a new doodle that sees the numbers two and five replace the ‘oo’ in the middle and, if you type ‘Google 25th birthday’ confetti will rain down the screen.

The birthday Google Doodle honours Google’s logo evolution, from the first logo from when Google began to its current iteration, with a special 25th birthday logo at the end as it turns a quarter of a century.

Google doodles have been around almost as long as the company itself. The first one was simple – a stick man over the search engine’s logo in 1998 when co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took time off to attend Burning Man Festival.

Since then, there have been around 5,000 more doodles created, from Valentine’s Day to the anniversary of the ice cream sundae in 2011. Now, a team of engineers and illustrators, called doodlers, are responsible for the various Google Doodles.

Google was created on September 4, 1998, but the company celebrates its birthday on September 27. It was founded by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California.

What is the Google Birthday Surprise Spinner?

The Google Birthday Surprise Spinner is an interactive spinner wheel Google made in 2017 to celebrate its 19th birthday. You can spin the wheel and then you get to play one of 19 different games or activities.