Google Logo: What’s Up With the Dots?
Google is known for changing its colorful logo to celebrate holidays and other important events — like the anniversary of Pac-Man.
But today is a little different. The search giant’s logo is made up of dozens of colored dots that move around when the user arrives on the page or moves the mouse or browser window — kind of like a particle simulator in primary colors. But nobody seems to know exactly why.
The best guess is that it has something to do with a press event about search that Google has scheduled for Wednesday. Google told Digits and the Search Engine Land blog that the logo is simply “fast, fun and interactive, just the way we think search should be.”
It’s not yet known what Google will announce at tomorrow’s search event, but expectations are for some technical updates to search. Google has been slowly rolling out search results that update as the user is typing the query, for example, and that could be part of the announcement.
Some bloggers have guessed that the logo is part of Google’s birthday celebration, but Google says that isn’t the case. In the past, the company has celebrated its birthday on Sept. 7 — but for the past few years, the celebration has been later in the month.
The logo works best in the newest browsers, particularly the latest versions of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome. In a test with Internet Explorer 6, users didn’t see the dots but were told they are using an older Web browser and should upgrade now. So perhaps Google is showing off in Chrome a bit — and encouraging people to upgrade.
Today’s doodle has generated plenty of excitement on Twitter, with a Twitter user named becstick summing up Digits’ feelings nicely: “How will I avoid temptation to just play all day with the dots on the Google home page?”
Some people — particularly those who aren’t on the newest browser or have Google.com as their home page — have expressed annoyance at seeing the animation every time they load the page. But a little annoyance is probably worth the many tweets and messages that Google is drumming up for HTML 5 and browser technology.
Readers, what do you think? Are you able to see the dots, and do you think it’s cool or a problem for your computer?
UPDATE: This post has been updated with comment from Google.
