Happy Holidays Google Doodle brings Christmas spirit to search giant

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Google gets into the Christmas spirit with its Happy Holidays Google Doodle

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The festive spirit has certainly infected Google this year with the search giant’s latest interactive ‘Google Doodle’ bringing bright lights to the holiday season.

The happy holidays doodle hit computer screens first in Australia and New Zealand atgoogle.com.au and google.co.nz and has now appeared in time zones in Canada and the United States as they near Christmas Day.

Once a computer user clicks on the coloured lights, the screen turns black and the letters of Google change to represent objects of the holiday season, including a snow ball, snow man and jingle bell.

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The Googe Doodle becomes interactive after the user clicks on the search engine's lights.

Once the lights have finished flashing, the search engine finishes the performance with a rendition of Jingle Bells, before returning search results for ‘happy holidays.’

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It is the latest Christmas bug to infect searchers after Google added a surprising festive touch for those who typed in “Merry Christmas” or just “Christmas” into the search bar.

Google  also added Stars of David to the bottom of the search bar when a user typed in Hanukkah.

A search for ‘let it snow’ meanwhile, will send your screen snowy in Google’s latest ‘Easter egg’ trick.

By typing ‘let it snow’ into a Google search bar, flakes of soft, white snow gently begin to fall from the top of your screen.

But as the snow continues to fall and the screen slowly frosts over, shovelling through your search results (which include the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra versions of the famous Christmas carol, Let it Snow) becomes much more difficult.

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As the snow falls, reading the search results becomes more difficult

At this point, you can either choose to hit the defrost button, or take advantage of an extra HTML5 element which builds on the success of ‘do a barrel roll’ by adding an new level of interactivity. By simply clicking and holding the left mouse button you can write a frosty phrase on your computer.

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An Easter egg is when a developer adds something surprising or unique when someone uses their service in a creative way. The term came into wide use with the advent of things hidden within DVD menus, though these little touches have been for almost as long as there have been computer programmers.

These two tricks are just a few in a long line of Google Easter eggs that have spread through social media, for example, when a user searches for “answer to life, the universe and everything,” Google pops up this answer:

The number 42 is, of course, the answer provided by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.