The topic of Google’s birthday is always a little tricky. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, the first technical spec is from September 20, 1998, and the first employee was hired on September 21, 1998 (Craig Silverstein — a fellow grad student with Sergey and Larry at Stanford). And yet, the search giant seems to prefer to celebrate their birthday today, on September 27 (which it is on the East coast of the U.S. right now).Well, it’s their birthday, and they can celebrate when they want to — and that’s apparently exactly what they started doing in 2005. And they are today with a new doodle logo by Wayne Thiebaud, an American painter often associated with the “Pop Art” movement. For Google’s 12th birthday today, he painted them a nice cake.For more history of Google (at least up to their tenth birthday) check out this page. As they approach their teenage years, the giant shows no signs of slowing down — quite literally. This year saw the launch of both “Caffeine” (their fresher, faster search results) and Google Instant.For much of their life, Google has basically dominated search, and their market share speaks to that. But Microsoft Bing has been proving to be a worthy competitor in recent years, so let’s hope puberty doesn’t make things awkward for Google.