Oodles of Doodles of Google

Yesterday (7 Oct 2009) when I started surfing the net, I was perplexed ... and then petrified: had the security of my laptop been compromised? Instead of the familiar multi-colour logo, all I saw was an array of thick and thin black lines as in a bar code. I thought Google’s site had been hacked.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I discovered that my fears were misplaced. What I saw was the bar code for the word Google. That was Google’s way of celebrating the 57^th anniversary of bar code.

Till Google told me yesterday. I did not know that I was only five years older than bar code. It had thought it was a much more recent 'invention' coinciding with the mall-supemarket culture. The patent (USP 2612994) for machine-readable representation of data using parallel lines of different widths at different spacings was awarded to Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on 7 Oct 1952.

It has been Google's practice to experiment with its logo by changing it to commemorate what it deems as significant events. Many may not have noticed, but early this month, Google logo paid homage to Mahatma Gandhi by through its logo.

Another day, another logo. To the utter delight and glee of self-confessed doodle-watcher like me, Google keeps coming out with interesting logos. This was their logo for St Patrick's Day. It is not as if they are occident-centric. For Holi, they had come up with a splash of colors, complete with buckets. And the start of the Chinese Year of the Rat was celebrated with a most suited visual.

If you would like to see oodles of doodles of Google (Just can’t resist the temptation to talk in rhyme all the time), go to

http://blog.arpitnext.com/2009/08/google-logo-slide-show-a-cool-greasemonkey-script-for-google-homepage.html

Here’s a bonus from me: if you want to generate the barcode representing your name, please go to http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/index.php