Marking the company’s 12th birthday, Google’s homepage yesterday featured a ‘bouncing balls’ doodle, showing off their programmers’ skills and sending a message out to the online community.

Reacting to the hovering of the cursor, the doodle is said to consist of lots of pieces of a web page, each using CSS3, an emerging standard which the company has been eager to push along with HTML5.

HTML5, which is currently being ratified by the World Wide Web Consortium, was used by Google in May in a doodle marking the 30th anniversary of the Pac-Man game.

In addition to yesterday’s bouncing birthday doodle, Google has today released yet another mysterious doodle, which has got the internet speculating about the agenda of the company’s “can’t miss” event tonight in San Francisco.

According to Mashable, the doodle, which features a grey Google logo getting its colours back simultaneously as the search term is typed in the box below, hints at the unveiling of a real-time search overhaul.

The reverse-engineered code of Tuesday’s Google Doodle can be found here.

Sources: Mashable, The Guardian

The search giant’s home page was turned into a fully playable game on Friday with the pizza-shaped Pac-Man making its way around a maze spelling out ‘Google’.

The doodle was also playable on iPhones which meant no Flash was used in its writing. However, as Guardian’s technology blogger Charles Arthur noted, the iPhone users played the game without sound as Flash was still used to include that.

Marcin Wichary, a programmer and designer at Google, said the nostalgic game was a natural fit for the home page of the search giant as they are both “deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood”.

Google-doodles have a long history of marking significant events and anniversaries. Famous for their mysterious nature, they are sometimes beyond cryptic, like the series of dots that marked the birthday of Samuel Morse.

The Telegraph has put together a nice doodle quiz.

Sources: The Guardian, The Telegraph