Google marks its 19th birthday with a ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’ doodle

For its 19th birthday, Google has posted a birthday doodle that leads to a spinner prompting surprise searches for 19 of its past Easter egg games and quizzes.

Three spins leads to the ICC Championship interactive cricket game Google launched earlier this year, an Earth Day quiz launched in 2015 and Google’s solitaire game Easter egg rolled out in 2016.

Google has also released a new “snake game” Easter egg — a digital game where you lead a snake around the screen to eat an apple. (I tried it, and I’m as awful at it as I am at every other video game I’ve ever played. My kids, I’m sure, will be totally engrossed.)

Google’s birthday doodle leads to a search for “google birthday surprise spinner” and is currently being displayed on nearly all of Google’s international home pages.

In Google’s blog post about the doodle, the company revisits how its co-founders met, explaining that Sergey Brin was “randomly” assigned to give Larry Page a tour of Standford University’s campus when Page first began his work toward a Ph.D. in computer science in 1997.

“This chance encounter was the happy surprise that started it all,” writes Google, connecting the birthday surprise spinner doodle to the company’s origin story.

Google says it continues to inch closer to its namesake (the number googol, which represents a “1” followed by one hundred zeros), serving more than 4.5 billion users in 160 countries.