What's Up With the Google Homepage Today? - Bouncy Balls

If you go to Google.com today, you will probably get a surprise, or maybe, if you are still hung over from Labor Day festivities, your eyes will fall out of your head. Either way, the Google logo today is not the normal simple, but elegant, colorful Google logo with the beveled text. Today, the text is built with a bunch of colorful balls.

These balls, however, are not stationary. They have been programed with an intense fear of mice, so if you go near it with your pointer they will de-organize and bounce all over the Google homepage. Once your pointer goes away, they re-organize.

There are numerous speculations for the reason behind this logo. One of them is that the animated page taps into the latest HTML and JavaScript code, so many people believe that Google is choosing the bouncy balls as a way for users to tell whether or not they have an up-to-date web browser. If they don't they won't see the really cool bouncy balls jumping all over the page.

That's just one speculation, though, and it seems a bit farfetched.

The other reason that people say the doodle is there is to celebrate Google's 12th birthday. Traditionally, it doesn't fall on today. Google's birthday either falls on September 4th (the day that Google was incorporated), 7th (when the company opened its doors in Menlo Park, California), or the 27th (the day when Google usually celebrates its birthday).

View another reason, and a video of the doodle in action on the next page.
[caption id="attachment_8471" align="alignleft" width="545" caption="The Google Homepage Today"][/caption]



Another speculation is that JavaScript was first releasted on September 1995 under the name of LiveScript as a part of Netscape Navigator 2.0 (an early web browser). Maybe this doodle has something to do with the 15th anniversary of Javascript.

Nothing is for certain yet, however, we're sure that we will get an answer from Google soon.

Below is a video of the logo in action.