Google Doodle celebrates search giant's 20th birthday

Tech giant Google is celebrating its 20th birthday today with a new Doodle marking the special occasion.

Today’s doodle features letter-shaped balloons attached to a gift box. It plays a YouTube video that animates popular searches from around the globe over the past two decades.

The various terms are Y2K, Pluto losing its status as a planet, Royal Wedding, 2012 on the Mayan calendar and avocado toast. It ends with a thank you note from Google.

On this day in 1998, two PhD students at Stanford University launched the new search engine, with the aim of making the world's information accessible and useful to all.

Today's video Doodle takes a stroll down memory lane by exploring popular searches all over the world throughout the last two decades.

The doodle is just one of the ways that Google is celebrating the occasion, which marks two decades of dominance in the search business. The company has gone from humble beginnings as a search engine to the most dominant force in advertising. Google now has a parent company, Alphabet, with tentacles that touch everything from self-driving cars to its Android mobile software and the extension of life.