Google’s famous homepage “Doodles” (the changing Google logo graphics) are well known and enjoyed by millions around the world as a way to mark an event or anniversary. But did you know that the very first Google Doodle was designed as a kind of “out of office” message?

In 1998 Brin and Page took the weekend off to go the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The Burning Man doodle (shown above), was designed by the Google guys and added to the homepage to let their users know they were out of office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash.

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As proud hosts to Google back when it was still a research project, and known as “BackRub,” here Stanfordnow showcases the original Google storage from way back in 1996. It’s made up of a whopping 40 GB (less than a modern iPod) and it’s made from, as fans of the building bricks will be delighted to see, LEGO. It even hash funny mini-figures on the top.

Legend has it that the reason for the LEGO construction was that the Google guys needed an easily expandable, and cheap way to house 10 4 GB hard drives, and LEGO fit the bill. Whether the primary colors of the bricks used were the hues that went on to inspire the Google logo’s design is up for debate, but we’d guess it wasn’t just a coincidence.

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Open google.com, Type Google Gravity in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button.Feel the effect of gravity on google. All page components will fall down due to gravity.

Open google.com, Type Epic Google in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button. Each component on the page will start growing bigger and bigger.

Open google.com, Type Google Hacker in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button. How google will look if it was made by a hacker.

Open google.com, Type Annoying Google in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button.

Open google.com, Type search in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button.

Open google.com, Type loneliest number in the search box and click on Search button. Find out which number is the loneliest number according to google.

Open google.com, Type Recursion in the search box and click on search button. You can noticeDid You Mean: Recursion text on top of results and it is recursively linked to the same page.

Open google.com, Type Google loco in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button.

Open google.com, Type number of horns on a unicorn in the search box and click on search button.

Open google.com, Type Find Chuck Norris in the search box and click on I’m feeling Lucky button. Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

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