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If you made one of the billion Google searches on Monday, chances are you would have seen a colourful and musical on the homepage.

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Stars of Google - Freddie Mercury and Queen

This latest Google doodle marked what would have been the 65th birthday of the music legend and featured a 98 second animated video of Mercury performing to fans and ascending to the stars on a tiger. It's the second longest doodle after the web giant's tribute to Charlie Chaplin earlier this year, but how has a quest for information led to the creation of spirit-lifting topical artworks?

According to the handily-named site the early concepts of search engines came alive with scientist Vannevar Bush's article 'As we may think', which was published in 1945. Bush spoke of a hypothetical device called a memex (memory index) that would work with the human brain and retrieve information through association.

In light of today's online search tools, his vision of storing and consulting information was spookily prophetic when he stated that: "Encyclopædia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox."

With the advent of the World Wide Web, the fight for search engine dominance really started hotting up and with scientific advances technology firms battled to get to the front of the race. The terms bots and spiders would become common place. Internet bots (short for robots) are software applications that perform basic repetitive tasks at superhuman speeds and which have a number of uses on the web. Spiders are a type of bot which are often used by search engines to crawl the web automatically, gathering information and recording links in order to keep indexing up-to-date.

With few people understanding exactly what goes into a search engine, it's no surprise that Google offer diverting animations, Yahoo want to personalise your homepage, Bing like to offer you themed trivia and Ask hopes you'll answer its question of the day.

Now some of the most exciting advances have been made, it's the details that can make all the difference.

To learn more about search engines, take a look at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ WebWise guides.