Yesterday, Google celebrated its 14th birthday, and, in honor of the pioneering web company, we're celebrating the amazing technology that made Google possible — the Internet. The web has certainly changed the way we live, and TED, a conference on technology, entertainment, and design, is devoted to exploring exactly how and why the Internet has transformed us. We've compiled seven compelling TED talks from great thinkers and activists about what makes the World Wide Web so great.

Environmentally conscious shoppers, rejoice! You can now find products that fit your requirements on Vine.com, a new eco-friendly shopping site that has the moral backbone of Mother Nature and the shipping speed of Amazon, its parent company. The website only sells products that fit into one or more of the following categories: natural, organic, renewable-energy-powered, reusable, made with sustainable materials, toxin-removing, energy-efficient, or water-efficient. Of course, we're searching the site on the lookout for gadgets that comply with green standards; check out our eight sustainable tech picks.

Since the Google Maps app for iPhone is a far off dream and Apple Maps might not be able to catch up for another 400 years, iOS 6 users are on the hunt for alternatives — and Bing believes their iPhone app is a contender. The team at Microsoft's "decision engine" put up a rather sneaky blog post yesterday, aimed at new smartphone users looking for an app with the "mapping functionality you need" and chose, of all things, an aerial view of Apple's Cupertino campus as an example screenshot.

Bing may seem like a small fish in a big pond dominated by Google (which leads with a commanding 66.8 percent share of the US search engine market), but don't discount the second-most popular search engine just yet. We took Bing's app for a spin, and found a surprisingly functional and practical maps application — that wasn't without its quirks. Read on for the six features that make Bing standout in the maps race.

There are only 13 certified Lego professionals in the world — and one of them is New York-based sculptor Sean Kenney, who turned his childhood love for Legos into a full-time career. His piece de resistance is a life-size polar bear that took over 1,000 hours to complete. Like the work of a mason, Kenney's creations are built brick-by-brick, with a coat of glue between each layer for security. His large-scale Lego installations are on display around the world at gardens, landmarks, companies, events, Lego stores, and, now, GeekSugar. Here are some of our favorite pieces from Lego sculptor Sean Kenney's incredible body of brick work.

Fourteen years ago today Google was born in a legendary Palo Alto garage. In honor of tech-iversary, we've compiled 14 our favorite Google doodles.

A way of celebrating the birthdays of pop culture legends and national milestones, the Google Doodle is a nod to the playful side of the company with a day-long redesign of its corporate logo on the site's homepage. The Google Doodle concept started while the search giant was still in its infancy when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin added a stick figure to the logo as a way of saying they were out of the office attending Burning Man in the Nevada desert. Over 1,000 doodles have appeared on Google homepages in the US and abroad in the years since.

A team of Google designers work on the doodles, but they are open to receiving suggestions and doodles themselves from the public.

Barnes & Noble is playing with fire — Kindle Fire. On the heels of Amazon's Kindle Fire HD announcement, the brick-and-mortar book retailer introduced the new Nook HD and Nook HD+ this week, boasting the "world's highest-resolution display on a seven-inch media tablet" and the "lightest, lowest-priced full HD tablet" on the market. Barnes & Noble's new offerings — the Nook HD 8GB ($199), Nook HD 16 GB ($229), Nook HD+ 16 GB ($269), and Nook HD+ 32 GB ($299) — are available for pre-order today.

Both the Nook HD/HD+ and Kindle Fire HD include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, run on a custom Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and are tapped into massive selections of books, magazines, and video. So what sets the latest contestant in the tablet competition apart? Here are eight distinctions between the two competing high-definition tablet ereaders.