Google has obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles.

The patent, released yesterday, describes "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."

Google has made headlines for its recent doodles, including an in honor of author Jules Verne's 183rd birthday and that were live for two days in December.

"A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time," Google's patent application reads. "For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event."

The application was filed almost 10 years ago, on April 30, 2001, by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. While Google doodles have become popular in recent months, the effort actually dates back to 1998, when Brin and Larry Page tweaked the Google homepage logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival. Two years later, webmaster Dennis Hwang was asked to produce a doodle for Bastille Day, and the rest is history.

Google now has a team of doodlers, and every year the company hosts a Google 4 Doodle contest that invites school children to submit drawings that will be featured on Google.com. The fourth annual contest , and students have a chance to take home a $15,000 scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for their school. The winning doodle will be on the homepage on May 20.

For more, see the of recent doodles below.