Google Doodles How would you change the Google logo to commemorate an event? If you use Google, the world's most popular search engine, there's a good chance you've seen some of the jazzed-up Google logos that sometimes appear on the company's homepage. Google periodically changes its logo (a colorful G-O-O-G-L-E ) to commemorate a special event. On the 100th anniversary of flight, for example, the two Google "O"s became the propellers of an old-fashioned airplane. And on the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, "Google" was written inside crossword puzzle squares. These special logos are called "doodles." And people around the world look forward to seeing them pop up on the screen. The doodle tradition wasn't planned. In Google's early days (1998), founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were running the site, took a few days off to attend an arts festival called Burning Man. To let users know they would be out of the office, they put a stick figure (Burning Man's logo) behind the second "O" in "Google." The logo generated such a great response that Page and Brin decorated the logo again for America's Thanksgiving holiday. Two years and a few logos later, Page and Brin asked Google intern Dennis Hwang to create a doodle for France's Bastille Day. It was so well-received that Hwang was appointed chief doodler, and doodles started appearing more regularly Today, a team of artists and engineers work together to create doodles. Before drawing, doodlers research the concepts to make sure they know how to illustrate them correctly. If they make a mistake, users are quick to notify them. Once, after posting a double helix doodle, geneticists contacted Google to inform them that the doodle was incorrect; there was a very small mistake in a tiny, colored bar. Google doodles celebrate a wide variety of events and people - from the first person in space to the inventor of the zipper. Google has created over 2,000
doodles around the world. Some doodles take a few hours to create. Others take a few months. While Google's first doodles were simple, today's doodles are very elaborate. Many are animated, and some are interactive. During the 2012 Olympic Games, users could steer a canoe across a Google river. Google generates most doodle ideas, but they do welcome suggestions from users. So, send in your doodle idea, and maybe one day you'll see it on the Google homepage!