Google celebrating its 19th birthday

As it turns out, it is Google’s 19th birthday on Wednesday. And to celebrate it, the tech giant has plastered a rather elaborate doodle on the search engine’s homepage. It illustrates a proper party spread, with a cake, some candles and party hats too. Amid all this explosion of colour, it is easy to miss out on the spin wheel that sits just behind the chocolate (at it looks like chocolate) cake. Google calls this the surprise spinner, and you click on that to play the spin wheel game.

This game is available on the web version as well as the mobile version of the Google.com homepage. Keep hitting the play button to reveal a new surprise every time. When you spin a wheel, it finally comes to a halt at one of the surprises. You get the option of either spinning the wheel again (which is relevant if you have been spending too much time with this) or click to open the surprise. As it turns out, the surprise games also consist of the doodles that Google has unwrapped in the past.

One surprise will take you to the MusicLab, which is a part of Google Experiments—here, it allows you to play arpeggios in different patterns, and you tap the wheel to explore major and minor chords—someone with no knowledge of musical theory or songwriting, will be as coordinated with this as a baby deer walking on ice. If you land up on the surprise with the chicken animation, you will be taken to a search page of “animal sounds” with the “Grrr” sound of a tiger leading the way—it is a mystery what the purpose of this might be in our lives, all of a sudden. One of the surprises will take you to a DJ console with two turntables—figuring your way out around this is perhaps slightly more complicated than an actual turntable, in the real world.

A more relevant surprise is the one that takes us to a search page about breathing exercises—now this could be a page to bookmark, if you regularly have stressful days at work