Google turns 27, the search giant’s journey from links to AI

MUMBAI: Search and you shall find but 27 years ago, finding almost anything online was a very different game. On 27 September 2025, Google marked its 27th birthday by bringing back its very first logo in a nostalgic Doodle, taking users to 1998 while pointing them towards its latest AI innovations. The date itself comes with a little Google-style asterisk: the company was incorporated on 4 September 1998, while 27 September became its long-running symbolic birthday. 

Google’s roots, however, stretch back to 1995, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford and began working on a search engine that ranked pages using links. The project was initially called BackRub before becoming Google, a play on “googol”, the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeroes. From dorm rooms, a rented garage and even an early server built with Lego, the company set out with a deceptively simple mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

The nostalgia is easy to understand because Google did not merely enter the internet era; it quietly became part of everyday language. “Google” eventually became a verb, with the Oxford English Dictionary adding it as one in 2006. But the search box was only the opening act. Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Chrome, YouTube and a growing universe of products turned the company into a technology ecosystem used by billions. Maps, for instance, went from a desktop tool launched in 2005 to a global platform used by more than 1 billion people every month, while Street View expanded Google’s understanding of the physical world far beyond a conventional map.

What makes Google’s story particularly interesting is how often the company has allowed its own products to be disrupted by changing user behaviour. One of the earliest examples came in 2000, when a surge of searches for Jennifer Lopez’s Grammy dress exposed a limitation of the traditional “10 blue links”. Users wanted the picture, not merely pages about it, pushing Google towards what became Google Images. It was an early lesson in Google’s history: sometimes the search itself tells the company what technology needs to become next.

That instinct has now brought Google to its biggest technological pivot since the smartphone era. Search is no longer simply about typing a few words and scanning links. Google’s AI Overviews have reached more than 2.5 billion users each month, while AI Mode crossed 1 billion monthly users in 2026. The company says queries in AI Mode have more than doubled every quarter since launch, while its redesigned Search can work across text, images, files, videos and Chrome tabs. In other words, the old search box is learning to listen, see, reason and act.

And then there is Gemini. Google’s AI ambitions have moved well beyond a chatbot sitting beside Search. By June 2026, Google said the Gemini app had crossed 900 million monthly users, more than doubling in a year, while Gemini was being integrated across all 13 of Google’s products with more than 1 billion users, including five with more than 3 billion users. The company is also pushing towards agents systems that can do more than answer a question and instead carry out tasks on a user’s behalf.

For Indian users, that evolution has been particularly visible. Google says more people use Google Lens every month in India than in any other country, while visual searches have risen 70 per cent globally year on year. In 2025, India was among the first markets outside the US to receive AI Mode, and Google expanded AI-powered Search experiences into Indian languages. Even Google Maps is being rebuilt around Gemini, using information from 35 million places in India and 250 million places worldwide to provide conversational navigation, recommendations and multi-step assistance.

There is something almost circular about the journey. Google began by helping people find information. That information led to new questions, new searches and new products. Those products changed how people travelled, communicated, watched videos, shopped and navigated cities which generated even more information and new expectations from technology. Now, Google is attempting to close the loop by having AI understand not just what people are searching for, but what they are actually trying to accomplish.

From BackRub to Search, from 10 blue links to Gemini, the company has spent 27 years turning curiosity into infrastructure. The colourful logo may still look familiar, but the machine behind the search bar is a very different beast from the one that first crawled the web in the late 1990s. And if Google’s history offers any clue, its next big shift may begin with something that looks just as ordinary: a question.