How did the idea for doodles start?

In 1998, before the company was even incorporated, the concept of the doodle was born with Google founders played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man Festival.

Two years later in 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked current webmaster Dennis Hwang, an intern at the time, to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. It was so well recieved by Google users that Dennis was appointed Google's chief doodler and doodles started showing up more and more frequently on the google homepage.

Over time, the demand for doodles has risen in the US and internationally. Creating doodles is now the responsibility of a team of talented illustrators (now called Doodlers) and engineers. for them, creating doodles has become a group effort to enliven the Google homepage and bring smiles to the faces of Google users around the world.

Interactive and Video Doodles

In May of 2010, on the 30th anniversary of the arcade game Pac-Man, Google unveiled worldwide their first interactive doodle, created in association with Namco. Anyone who visited Google coul play Pac-Man on the logo, which featured the letters of the word 'Google' on the Pac-Man maze. The logo also mimicked the sounds the original arcade game made.

Since that time, Google has continued to post occasional interactive and video Doodles, including but not limited to the following:

• On September 3, 2010, Google replaced the logo with an interactive Buckmisterfullerene or "buckyball" doodle to commemorate the 25th aniverasry of its invention.
• On September 6, 2010, Google added another interactive logo, which consisted of numerous colored balls that fly near a cursor.
• On October 8, 2010, Google ran its first animated doodle, a short music video of "Imagine" to commemorate John Lennon's 70th birthday. Similarly, Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday was celebrated on September 5, 2011, with an animated clip set to "Don't Stop Me Now"

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was replaced with an "Insert Coin" button. Pressing this once enabled you to play the Pac-Man logo. Pressing it once more added a second player, Mrs. Pac-Man, enabling 2 players to play at once. Pressing it for a third time performed an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. It was then removed on May 23, 2010, initially replacing Pac-Man with the normal logo. Later that day, Google released a permanant Google Pac-Man site, due to the popular user demand for the playable logo.

Controversy and Critisism

On February 14, 2007, Valentine's Day, the Google Doodle featured a chocolate-dipped strawberry that combined the second "g" and the "l" as its green stem. This design gave the appearance that the "l" was missing, thereby displaying "Googe". In responce to several speculations, the Official Google Blog responded: "When you look at the logo, you may worry that we forgot our name overnight, skipped a letter, or have decided that 'Googe' has a better ring to it. None of the above. I just know that those with true romance and poetry in their soul will see the subtlety immediately. And if you're feeling grouchy today...I suggest eating a strawberry."

On March 31, 2013, controversy arose on social media and elsewhere when Google posted a Doodle celebrating American activist Cesar Chavez instead of Easter on their American homepage, prompting a Google spokesperson to respond: "We enjoy celebrating holidays at Google but, as you may imagine, it's difficult for us to choose which events to highlight on our site. Sometimes for a given date, we feature an historical event or influential figure that we haven't in the past." In 2014, Google received some criticism for failing to honor D-Day with a Doodle and instead honoring a Japanese Go player. In response to the criticism, Google deleted the logo and added a series of links to images of the invasion of Normandy. Google was also criticized in light of a study that indicated the subjects of their Doodles were a majority white men, and that not enough women or people of other ethnicities were celebrated. The company responded by indicating that the issue was being addressed.

On September 13, 2007, Google posted a Doodle honoring author Roald Dahl on the anniversary of his birth. This date also happened to coincide with the first day of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanahm and Google was immediately criticized by some groups for this decision, due to the fact that Dahl was anti-Israel and, some believe, santi-Semitic. Google removed the Doodle by 2:00 p.m. that day, and there remains no evidence of its existence in Google's official Doodle archive to this date. Google was also criticized prior to and including 2007 for not featuring versions of the Google logo for American patriotic holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day. That year, Google featured a logo commemorating Veterans Day.