Google celebrates 19th birthday with ‘surprise spinner’

It’s Google’s 19th birthday and the search engine decided to celebrate it in the coolest way possible.Google stuffed 19 doodles in one huge spinner allowing users to choose from the top interactives it has churned out since 1998.

Called the ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’, a user simply has to spin the dial and wait for it to stop at a game, which includes classics like Pac Man, Arpeggios, Birthday piñata, DJing, Theramin, Cricket cricket and Hallowe’en spells.

In 1997, Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, had just arrived at Stanford University to pursue his PhD in computer science. Coincidentally, Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, was arbitrarily assigned to show Page around. The two came together, looking for a way to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. They hunkered down in a garage - Google’s first office - and got to work. And the rest, as they say, is history.