Google Logo Has Millions Confused, but Thoroughly Entertained

If you’ve visited Google today—and we’re sure you have—then you’ve seen the brightly colored bouncing superballs the logo dissolves into at the mere attempt of a mouse scroll-over. No amount of clicking, chasing, or cursing will get the fleeing spheres to settle down, until you finally begin to type your search terms into the box.

The May Logo from Google

And today’s logo isn’t the first of the company’s design home-runs: in May, Google designed an interactive Pac-man game that had millions of people around the world shirking their responsibilities and chomping away in the hungry little sphere’s virtual world. Literally, millions. CNET reported a study that found that 4.8 million man hours were wasted in playing the logo Pac-man game, amounting to a loss of around $120 million dollars—a testament to just how brilliant the interface actually was.

But while May’s logo was a celebration of Pac-man’s creation, the motivations behind today’s curious creation are a bit more mysterious. SearchEngineLand dispelled the rumor that the ‘Doodle’, as it is now being called in internet circles, is related to the company’s birthday, which is pegged sometime in early September: a spokesperson for the company told the website that today’s logo is “not related to Google’s birthday but is fast, fun and interactive, just the way we think search should be.”

Several websites, including that of the UK based Guardian, speculate that the logo is designed to “draw attention to the importance of CSS3, an emerging standard which is being developed as the next version of the web language HTML, called HTML5, is being ratified by the World Wide Web Consortium.” The Guardian continues to state that “Google has been eager to push HTML5 and CSS3, and its Chrome browser, because it offers many more possibilities in the design of web pages, which could be more interactive with less effort by designers.”

So those little superballs you see zipping around the Google homepage? They’re made using a fancy new form of web coding called CSS3—and the code on the homepage contains instructions telling the little devils to move away from your cursor on the screen. Simple, yet brilliant–just like the company’s homepage.

Photo from dpstyles via flickr