Google's 25th Birthday Celebrated with Special Google Doodle

Google's 25th birthday is here, and it's time to celebrate with a bang! The tech giant is throwing a party with a special Doodle to mark this milestone. Now, Google might always be looking ahead, but birthdays? Well, they're a golden opportunity to take a trip down memory lane.

Rewind the clock 25 years, and you'll find two bright-eyed doctoral students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, crossing paths at Stanford University. It was the late '90s, and the internet was still in its Wild West days. What did these two have in common? A shared vision – to make the World Wide Web more accessible. From their humble dorm rooms, they toiled away, conjuring up a prototype for a game-changing search engine. As their project gained momentum, they made the leap to their first-ever office – a rented garage. Talk about starting from the bottom! And so, on September 27, 1998, Google Inc. was born, and the world would never be the same.

Flash forward to today, and you'll see Google's logo has transformed over the years, just like the company itself. But the mission? It's been a rock-solid constant: organizing the vast sea of information that is the internet, and making it universally accessible and useful. Fast forward a bit more, and you'll find billions of people worldwide relying on Google for everything under the sun – searching, connecting, working, playing, and a million other things. This celebratory Doodle is lighting up screens across the globe, except in a few nooks and crannies, like Russia.

Now, if we rewind the clock just a couple of days to September 25, we were grooving to a different tune in the Doodle world. It was a tribute to South African jazz virtuoso Todd Matshikiza, a musical maestro of many talents. Illustrated by the talented Keith Vlahakis, this Doodle paid homage to his masterpiece, the cantata "Uxolo" (that's 'peace' in case you were wondering). Picture this: it was the 70th Johannesburg Festival, back on September 25, 1956, and Matshikiza's notes were filling the air.

Matshikiza wasn't just a one-hit wonder, mind you. His iconic track "Quickly in Love" made waves in the 2013 movie "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom." He also cooked up the musical score for not one, but two groundbreaking stage productions. First, there was "King Kong" in 1958, an all-Black jazz musical sensation that even took London by storm. Then came "Mkhumbane" in 1960, where Matshikiza's compositions, alongside Alan Paton's genius, left audiences spellbound.

So, whether it's celebrating a tech giant's quarter-century journey or grooving to the jazz beats of yesteryears, Google Doodles are the heartbeat of the internet, adding that splash of color and culture to our screens.