New Year 2026 begins with Google’s creative doodle celebration – here’s what it looks like

Happy New Year! The ball has not yet dropped on Times Square in New York City, but millions around the world are preparing to ring in the new year 2026, while over on the Google home page, users can enjoy this year’s festive New Year’s Eve Doodle.

The Doodle on Google’s homepage for New Year’s Eve offers users a colorful and festive way to celebrate the final hours of 2025 as it ushers in the new year with a graphic design to match the global spirit of hope, joy, and new beginnings. The 2026 Doodle is live on the Google search page in many countries and regions.

The lively party-themed Doodle is filled with sparkling gold text, glittering balloon-style numbers, and moving confetti graphics that match real-world parties and celebrations, as users count down the final hours, minutes, and seconds of the year 2025. The Google Doodle can be seen as a special welcome to 2026. The hover animation design also has the “2025” numbers double as “2026” via an interactive mouse-over (hover) animation: when a user hovers the cursor over the designed numbers, the gold digits elegantly flip over with a touch of digital magic to reveal the new year of 2026 on Google’s search page. On the bottom of the page, two striped party poppers transform into horizontal streams of colorful bubbles and stars.

New Year Doodles have been a favorite holiday tradition for many users over the last few decades on Google’s search homepage: the company has created a unique, artistic Doodle for New Year’s celebrations since the early 2000s, as well as for other major holidays, observances, historical moments, cultural events, scientific achievements, and memorable days around the world. Google has also made an effort to produce Doodles that speak to important and relevant global events, cultural moments, scientific breakthroughs, and people that have impacted billions of lives.

Google’s New Year Doodle is a unique and special New Year’s Eve greeting for the year 2026 because it is universally significant. Billions of people across the world are gathering with family and friends on the eve of 2026 for big parties, small family dinners, large social gatherings, or just quietly reflecting in anticipation of the new year, and as the globe collectively pauses at the transition between years 2025 and 2026, the festive Doodle is a visual reminder of the celebration and the shared collective transition. The colorful and interactive Google Doodle celebrates the unique transitional time when the old year ends and the new year has yet to truly begin.

In a brief official description for the special 2026 New Year’s Eve Doodle, Google says that the Doodle reflects on the universal meaning of New Year’s Eve, a time of looking back on what has been, making space for what has been learned, and welcoming the future with anticipation, as people around the world use this day to pause, celebrate, and look ahead with hope. A New Year’s Eve Doodle on the search homepage of one of the world’s most used websites is Google’s small way to reflect a global moment of hope.

Welcome to 2026, friends. It’s been a long time coming, but here it is.