Monday, November 28, 2011

Doodles, cool and archived


I saw a really surprising search the other day.  I was watching a school-age kid trying to find one of Google's clever interactive logos. You know, like the one from today celebrating Bob Noyce's 84th birthday.  


You've probably noticed--they're sometimes interactive, they're always celebratory in some way and they have a popup explaining what it's all about.  (I'm showing the popup on the right-hand side of the above image.)  


What you might not know is that if you click on the image on the Google Home Page, it will do an appropriate search for you on that topic.  


What was so interesting about watching this kid search for the Google Archive was that he didn't know they're called "Doodles," so he was fooling around searching with queries like [Google images ] (which won't get you very far because the results are so heavily skewed by Google Images, the search verical).  He tried things like [cool Google images ] before I finally told him to try adding the word "doodle," which of course got him what he wanted.  


Search lesson:  Sometimes you just need the right word to access the right body of information.  The deep trick is knowing which is the right word. 


In this case, the kid might have tried to search for [Google images ] on Images and he would have found all kinds of results, including links to the Google Official Blog, which then has links to the archived Doodles.  


To save YOU the trouble, here are a few links to Google's collection of great Doodles.  


The official Google Doodle archive


The marvelous Doodle ode to Stanislaw Lem 


The Les Paul interactive Doodle (play your own tunes!)


And last, but not least, the video of the famous Charlie Chaplin Doodle.   


Search on!



1 comment:

  1. I disagree that you had to know the right word. Google something like : special google homepage graphics

    ReplyDelete