If you head to Google’s homepage this morning, you may find yourself distracted from your query by the trippy Google logo, which is made of balls that fly away and into the foreground as your mouse approaches. Like Google’s playable Pac-Man doodle that had the web awhirl in May, this one is also coded in HTML5, which has led Pocket Lint to speculate — “rather wildly,” as New Scientist Britishly puts it — that “maybe Google has some big web announcement lined up for its 8 September event in San Francisco and the doodle holds a clue?”
Google hasn’t officially commented on the meaning of this doodle (and isn’t it silly that Google is now in the position of being expected to comment on its homepage doodles?) but the likeliest explanation is that this is a birthday celebration of some sort; up until 2005, Google celebrated its birthday on September 7th, although they switched to celebrating on September 27th in recent years. Google (according to a since-deleted comment noted on TechCrunch): “The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”
