Google celebrates its 15th birthday with a playable pinata game doodle

New Delhi: It has been 15 years since 1998 when two Stanford university students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, got together to form a company that would change the face of the Internet, for ever.

Interestingly, the selection of September 27 as Google's birthday seems to be a one of convenience than the actual date when the company was founded.

Google celebrated September 7 as its birthday in during its initial years. In 2005 Google changed the date to September 27 to make it coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that the search engine was indexing. Google's date confusion also extends to its date of incorporation. Google for quite some time on its corporate history page mentioned September 7, 1998 as its date of incorporation but that date too has now inexplicably changed to September 4.

For its 15th birthday, Google has posted an interactive version of the pinata, a popular Mexican birthday party game. The purpose of the game is to hit the pinata (a decorated container usually made of paper or cloth and filled with candy or toys) and extract as many toffees as possible. A user gets 10 chances to strike the piñata with a stick controlled by the spacebar on a computer keyboard or by the mouse and by swiping on a touchscreen mobile device.

The Google letters appear as guests in a birthday party with and the second 'g' is the one playing the pinata game blindfolded whole the other letters jump about cheerfully. There is also a cake with two lit candles with the numbers 1 and 5 atop signifying the 15th birthday of the Internet giant.

In 2012, for its 14th birthday Google celebrated with a chocolate cake animated doodle with 14 candles on it and the Google logo etched on the cake. The cake then got covered in Google colours and the 14 candles rearranged themselves as tally marks to denote the number 14.

For its 13th birthday in 2011 Google doodled for itself a photograph that showed Google's 13th birthday celebrations. There was a cake on a table with 13 candles on it, the Google logo sat around the table in party hats and gifts and baloons adding to the celebratory mood.