Hey all, enjoy Thanksgiving Day (even if your country doesn’t) and eat lots of turkey with no regard for your health. Or tofurkey, or whatever floats your boat. Just have fun today.
I’m watching the parade on NBC with the wife, and I’m shocked at how much Al Roker keeps mispronouncing everything. He was talking with Christopher Meloni, and asked him about his show, Law and Order: SUV. Oy.
Anyway, here’s Google’s Thanksgiving logo for 2007:
I think it’s a lot more festive than last year’s:
Yahoo’s doing an animated Flash logo again:
If you don’t have Flash, they show this image version:
Yahoo’s logo is the same one they ran last year, as far as I can tell.
Ask.com’s doing a full page image again, showing off this giant tasty turkey:
Doodle 4 Google, the competition where schoolchildren create Google logos and voters determine which goes on the homepage of Google in that country, just wrapped up the British edition for this year. The winning Doodle, by Claire Rammelkamp, 14:
This past Veterans Day, Google did something very different, and actually marked a holiday honoring our soldiers. The company, which had never ran a holiday logo for Memorial Day or Veterans Day, ran this:
It’s nice to see the company finally rectifying this one. I talked about this as far back as 2004 (on the old BlogSpot blog) how people were complaining that Google didn’t care about these holidays. Perhaps next year they’ll do one for Memorial Day, too.
Gary notes that the U.K. versions of Ask and Yahoo included reminders to wear a poppy flower for Remembrance Day (same holiday, different name, plus the poppy tradition), but the U.S. search engines had nothing.
Google Turkey ran this Doodle holiday logo on Monday celebrating Turkey’s Republic Day, the 84th anniversary of the day the Turkish Constitution was amended, making Turkey a Republic and dissolving the Ottoman Empire:
There are a bunch of search engines and other websites running special logos today for Halloween, and here they are:
YouTube’s is simple and very effective, a pumpkin replacing half the logo:
It’s the sort of logo Google used to do, before they started treating this thing as art half the time. Don’t know what I mean? Just look at the complexity of Google’s Halloween Doodle:
Spooky, but it also looks like a lot of work. Remember the days where it was obvious the most important tool for creating a Google logo was cutting and pasting?
Yahoo is running this cute little thing, another one of their animated Flash logos:
If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see this simpler static image:
Even AOL’s getting into it, with their own animated Flash logo:
(reload the page to see any of the animations from the beginning)
There’s also Technorati (it works better on a green background:
And Ask.com, they’ve gone full page with another of their huge exciting designs, using this:
Which came out liks this:
And don’t forget Dogpile:
Finally, Search Engine Roundtable has an animated logo, which you’ll have to go there to see. Here’s a screenshot of it, courtesy of Barry:
This logo, in honor of the birthday of recently deceased Luciano Pavarotti on October 12:
This logo, in honor of Korea’s Thanksgiving (called Chuseok or Chusok):
This logo, in honor of China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, on September 25:
This logo, in honor of Germany’s reunification day:
And finally, this logo, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Sputnik on October 4:
Some are criticizing Google for running a logo honoring Sputnik, a major accomplishment of a totalitarian Soviet regime, when it has never ran a Doodle honoring U.S. military personnel on Memorial Day or Veterans Day.
Google ran this Google Doodle logo on Thursday for the birthday of Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach:
Philipp notes how this query does an excellent job of showing off Google’s new Universal Search integration.
As LGF points out, Google doesn’t run logos to commemorate Memorial Day or 9/11, but it does mark the birthday of Dahl, who late in his life expressed hatred for Jews and understanding of Hitler’s need to “pick on them”. From Wikipedia:
He told a reporter in 1983 that: “There is a streak in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity”. He further exclaimed, that even a miserable man such as Hitler did not pick on them for no reason.
According to LGF, the logo was pulled from the US Google.com by mid-morning, and it only ran on Google.co.uk in England for the rest of the day.
I don’t blame Google for going with the Dahl logo, especially since one of Google’s founders is Jewish. Henry Ford was an anti-Semetic bastard of the highest order, but we can’t strike him from the history books either, and Dahl’s books have delighted generations of children. If anything, this should merely serve as a reminder of the hatred and racism that was common in earlier generations, feelings that certain people bury until they hit those elderly years where many people lose normal common sense.
In other words, our elderly aren’t perfect. Some of them have hated in ways that younger Americans can’t even imagine (though the youth of this nation aren’t perfect by any means). Racism was a very different thing in the first half of the 20th century, and we shouldn’t forgive our elders for their sins to those of different colors, religions and other differences. Actions like that are sometimes only forgiven when the people who commited them are no longer present on this earth, not just because they no longer have the power to start a lynching.
Some people change and accept those who are different, others just change their tune and keep their hatred hidden. I see it every day in casual racist comments from older people that infuriate me. There were no “good old days”, if you ask me. Lets just move forward and let the ravages of time remove the monsters from our midst.
UPDATE: Google has issued a statement saying it removed the logo due to “user concerns”. Read all you need to into that. Barry notes that the Doodle ran on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which may have caused Dahl’s anti-Semetism to offend even more.
CORRECTION: Google didn’t run the Doodle on their Italian search engine, but rather ran it on the Google Italy blog, after the commemorative logo was submitted by Fabrizio Annovi. I should have spent more time reading the translation, and I apologize. Thanks to KK for pointing out my mistake in the comments.
Google has put together a special tab for your iGoogle personalized homepage for the Rugby World Cup which started Friday in France. You can add this tab to your iGoogle page, merely by heading over here. The tabs let you follow live scores, see the scores in all games, hear cheers for your team, see fan videos from YouTube and see Google Maps satellite view of stadiums.
Google also ran this Doodle in a bunch of countries to commemorate the start of the Cup:
Here are a few Google Doodle holiday logos that ran recently:
Google China ran this Doodle in recognition of the one-year countdown to the Beijing 2008 Olympics:
Zorgloob points out the the “366″ in the logo originally read “365″, until someone reminded logo designer Dennis Hwang that 2008 is a leap year, and the one-year countdown is 366 days. Zorgloob has a screenshot of the logo that appeared on Google.cn for a mere short period of time.
Google is running this Doodle holiday logo now on Google Australia:
The logo is celebrating NAIDOC Week, or National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee Week, which is an an annual celebration of the contributiosn of Australia’s indigenous peoples.
Yes, I’m sure someone realizes the silliness of having not renamed NAIDOC Week when it went from a day to a week (the D in NAIDOC is for Day, but it is always a week-long celebration). It’s one of the worst cases of an acronym that needs to be changed.
(via Zorgloob)
Google ran this Doodle in Russia to commemorate the 2014 Winter Olympics:
Wait… It’s 2007, right?
Oh, okay, the International Olympic Committee awarded Sochi, Russia the 2014 Winter Games on July 4, so Google whipped up the Doodle to honor their victory.
That’s pretty cool of them. I wonder in 2014, if they’ll run the Doodle again, or a similar one. Or if they’ll still be running Doodles. Or if they’ll still be called Google. Or if Google will be a completely different company.
Or if this blog will still be around.
I’ll make you a deal: If this blog is still around in seven years (and is thus ten years old), I’ll make sure to blog about it then. I’ve even set up an Outlook reminder for 2014.
Why can’t New York get the Olympics?
(via Zorgloob)
Here’s hoping everyone enjoyed the Fourth of July yesterday, celebrating it, or at least having a nice time on our nation’s birthday*. I had fun, hanging out with my wife and in-laws, and enjoying a giant steak at Hapisgah Steak House here in Queens, and brought along my camera for an extreme close-up of my dinner.
To me, that’s America, good and bad. It’s excessive, and its delicious, and we thrive on being excessive in our “pursuit of happiness”. We try to do what many human beings want to do, just more successfully than others, and a lot of times we don’t realize the consequences of those actions until later. Our hearts are in the right place, and we get it right eventually, but sometimes it seems like we are just a bunch of animals, staring at juicy piece of meat. We’re not. We always pay the bill when it comes.
Anyway, that’s my strange analogy for the fourth. How’d you enjoy yesterday, or as the case was, not enjoy it?
The search engines did their thing, posting their holiday logos yesterday. Google went with the flag and the eagle:
Thankfully, Google corrected their mistake of last year, when they were doing cutesy logos:
And went back to basics. 2005:
2004:
2003:
2002:
Yahoo went the animated Flash logo route. Here’s what they ran:
And the non-Flash version (exact same one they ran last year), courtesy of Barry:
However, it was Ask.com that went all out, bringing back their recent tradition of giant, stunning, full-page holiday celebrations. Here’s a screenshot from Barry:
The one problem: If you personalized your Ask.com start page, you didn’t see the flag. They basically just changed the default scheme. I’m tempted to start using the default scheme, just so I don’t miss the next one. Here’s the full-size image (1600×1050, 134,251 bytes) that was used as the background, created by Stuart Seger:
Last year, Ask.com shocked me by doing the first of these:
Anyway, that’s all for this year. Let’s hope the next year for our country is filled with prosperity, sanity, and less violence and poverty. And let’s try not to obsess about celebrities, at least a little bit less?
* - Unless it’s not your nation, in which case, hope you got a day off work anyway.
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Google ran this holiday Doodle logo yesterday, in honor of Canada Day:
I celebrated Canada Day yesterday with another of our great barbecues, this time hosting 28 people in our yard. Okay, I live in New York, so I wasn’t celebrating Canada Day, but rather “Good Weather toDay”, but the barbecue was great!
Canada Day is, of course, the celebration of the establishment of Canada as a self-governing province on July 1, 1867. People normally get off work and have fun in the sun on Canada Day, but since it was a Sunday this year, did they make today a national holiday? Canadian readers, let us know!
(via Zorgloob)
