Google Ball Doodle Debate Reaches a Fever Pitch

Earlier Tuesday we wrote about the Google homepage illustration (or "doodle," as Google calls these things) that's sparked so many Google searches it popped up in Google Trends. By late morning, variations of "Google balls," "Google logo" and "Google dots" took up five spots on Google Trends' top searches.

The search - about the floating, size-changing, swooping balls that make up the word "Google" on the search page - is still popular Tuesday evening, and Google itself is mostly mum on the doodle's meaning, but the following tweet appeared on Google's official Twitter page by mid-afternoon: "Boisterous doodle today. Maybe it's excited about the week ahead..."

Thanks, Google. Way to torture your users even more.

Of course, "torture" is too strong a word. After all, we're only talking about dots that look like the plastic colored balls that kids jump into at an amusement park.

But what does that cryptic tweet mean? One thing's for sure: The logo has nothing to do the company's birthday, according to this post on searchengineland.com. (Google's official birthday is Sept. 27.)

The domain name google.com was registered on Sept. 15, 1997. Perhaps the tweet is a reference to the registration. Perhaps next week we'll all be a little wiser when it comes to "Google balls."

But the most popular theory seems to be that the logo is a reference to Google's September 8 search event. Last week the company sent out the invites:

So what's the story? Maybe Google will tell us all Wednesday. And hopefully the answer is as at least as fascinating as Tuesday's doodle.