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Play 'Where's Waldo' with Google for its 25th birthday
Google's new Doodle game is a treasure hunt through search history
Google's search engine just hit the quarter-century mark, and to celebrate the occasion, the company is throwing a virtual bash with an interactive "Most Searched Playground" doodle, revealing 25 hot topics that have rocked the world over the past 25 years, like a stroll down memory lane, Google style.
Help Google reunite a couple of cute hamsters in its latest Valentine’s Day Doodle
Check out the short, yet sweet game from Google
Google's been livening up its home page for decades with its now-famous Doodles, keeping us entertained, informing us about important events, and just generally making it a slightly more fun place to visit. In addition to static Doodles, we occasionally get to play around with a fun interactive one, and that's just the kind we're checking out today: Google’s latest Doodle is a little Valentine's game where you have to reunite two cute hamster lovers.
Google's latest Doodle is an ambitious (but pretty easy) RPG you can easily waste an hour on
And if you're blogging about it, that hour counts as 'research'
We're all familiar with Google's doodles, which appear on the Google.com homepage and up in the corner when using Search and are usually tied to specific events or holidays. Today Google announced a new one that some of us have probably seen winking from the corner with its pixel-art graphics, and it's a little different. Sure, sometimes these doodles have little games baked into them, but the new Doodle Champion Island Games is Google's biggest and most ambitious doodle to date: It's an RPG.
Google Discover will get a major theming overhaul in Android 12
Google Doodles spread their background color down the feed
Google is focusing on the visual experience of Android 12. The latest fruit of that endeavor is a bit of fresh paint on the Discover feed. Google Doodles, the little shifting variations on the Google logo, have appeared at the top of the feed for a while now. But with the latest version of Google search installed on Android 12, Doodles now theme the background of the feed itself. Neat.
Google is getting in the mood for a spooky Halloween
Doing its part to help celebrate a socially distant holiday
Halloween is right around the corner, and even if many of us won't celebrate the festivities the way we usually do, Google is trying to do its part to make the best of the situation with features that will help you have a socially distant Halloween. Like every year, the company has hidden a plethora of spooky surprises in its search engine and other products.
As the shopping season closes in, it's important to be running the latest versions of any apps that do run financial transactions. Android Pay just got a new update to version 1.35 and it looks a little more involved than performance enhancements. Among the live features, you can now long-press most text fields and barcodes to copy the contents into your clipboard. A teardown also shows that Android Pay may soon have notification channels, support for transit cards, and a new promotional game that puts you on a quest for Doodles.
Yesterday, NASA announced that it (along with international partners) had discovered seven Earth-size planets orbiting a single star. Even more importantly, three of them are located in the star's habitable zone, the range around a star where liquid water is possible. The solar system (named TRAPPIST-1) is unfortunately located 40 light-years away from Earth, so sending a probe or a person there isn't really possible for now.
As you probably know by now, Google has a tradition of changing the Google logo for various events, holidays, and birthdays. This year, the logo is being changed every day leading up to Valentine's Day, with a mini-game for each one.
There are many small things Google does to delight us all, from the hidden easter eggs in various apps and Android versions to the various Google Doodles you see each time you start Search. Speaking of these doodles, you must have seen a birthday doodle at least once. The design may have changed throughout the years, but there's always cake and/or candles to cheer you up.
Happy Birthday, Google, you're legally an adult now. According to the Google Doodle, anyway: the actual date that Google became a company is something of a point of contention. Google's own history says that it was incorporated in California on September 4th, 1998, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin setting up shop in a garage office in Menlo Park. A little less than two decades later it's the most dominant search engine on the planet, it develops the world's most-used operating system, it sells more advertising than a billion Times Squares, and it never turns down a chance to make its logo look weird on the home page.
Olympic Games. Rio de Janeiro. 2016. Right, now that we've hit all of the ridiculous trademarks claimed by the International Olympic Committee and the cease-and-desist letters are already on their way, we can talk about Google's latest Doodles. As explained on the official Search blog, the company's latest fanciful logo reinterpretations hide a selection of minigames, all of which are rather vaguely themed after the upcoming events in Rio.
By now, you'll probably have heard that Prince died yesterday in his home in Minnesota at the age of 57. Today, Google is paying tribute to him with a 'Purple Rain' Google Doodle and by colouring Google Play Music's usually orange branding purple for the day.