Google Doodle for Earth Day

Check out Google’s Doodle commemorating Earth Day today. You can interact with the Doodle, changing seasons with lots of fun details such as flying birds, growing trees and swimming fish. The Google team has created over 1000 doodles for our homepages around the world, bringing a little bit of joy and information to our everyday searches.

There isn’t one answer to this question. Many doodles are simply graphics, though it seems Google is getting more creative these days, using  HTML and JavaScript to animate sprites, and in some more complex Doodles, they use a combination of HTML5 and Flash, often with an HTML5 primary version and a fallback to Flash on browsers that don’t fully support HTML5. For very complex Doodles with audio such as the MOOG synthesizer (http://www.google.com/doodles/robert-moogs-78th-birthday), Flash was used entirely, as audio filtering is just outside the realm of what HTML5 can do across all the browsers, and there wasn’t a way to accomplish the effect without Flash.

I’m excited to see what they come up with next!