Searching for anything related to the Chinese new year on the U.S. or China Google homepages will present you with a surprisingly lively display of colors in the traditional and boringly dull white background and blue links display that we've grown accustomed to. There's a new color, red, and some new shapes! Oh, how I longed for some shapes other than rectangles and thumbnails for videos.

All jokes aside, Google has decided to honor the Chinese new year by separating the one box results and AdSense sponsored links on the left, by turning the separating bar into a string of firecrackers, the type used in the celebrations that are to come tonight.

The Chinese homepage also has a doodle logo, that has a mouse turning the page (ok, a rat, because the upcoming year will be the Year of the Rat) and clicking on it will redirect to a search result page, promoting a Google Rebang site that lets users send free and predefined SMS holiday greetings. It's relatively new, but it also pops up when searching for other queries like "new year," written in Chinese kanji, as Philipp Lenssen of Blogoscoped noticed.

The exploding firecrackers are an ancient tradition, to drive away evil spirits. Originally made out of bamboo sticks and wrapped in red papers, they have been with the Chinese culture since its early years. Now, was Google trying to suggest something there with the evil spirits?

Go get ready for the new year, as I'm sure it will be all over the news, with the lively colored dragons and the extremely loud and noisy firecrackers that are traditional to the celebration of passing into a new year. If you want, you could rent a dragon costume and go scare your kids or neighbors, just for the fun of it. You now have the means to do it, have you got the motive?