Doodle

Update: In keeping with the square theme, Google has taken this anniversary as an opportunity to join Instagram, hooray! First post is the Rubik’s Cube in video.

This may just be the best Google Doodle yet: a fully-functional Rubik’s Cube! Click on the small cube to open up the interactive version. Click and drag any row or column to rotate it, and do the same underneath or alongside the cube to turn the entire cube … 
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With so much of what is offered on Valentine’s Day feeling contrived and commercial, today’s U.S. Google doodle provides a rather heartwarming antidote, allowing you to listen to real-life love stories from This American Life.

Click on any of the hearts to play the story, narrated by Ira Glass. If you enjoyed those, you can subscribe to the free weekly This American Life podcast on iTunes … 
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In one of the coolest doodles yet, Google is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the British TV series Doctor Who? with a multi-level game in which you can play any of the eleven doctors.

This particular doodle delivers rather more than Google’s description of them as “10 seconds of homepage happiness.”

Clearly Google’s staff are fans of the series, as Street View includes the ability to enter the Doctor’s TARDIS.

As Google turns 15, it is celebrating with an animated doodle and an Easter Egg that takes us back to its birth in 1998. Simply google google in 1998 to see the page as it looked then.

The 1998 page is fully-functional, but the time travel doesn’t last long: any search conducted on the page is carried out using today’s index and with the results returned in today’s design … 
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Are you dreaming of a white Christmas online? Don’t worry, Google’s gone all out this year to make winter festivities memorable for both its employees and users. As we reported this morning, Google staffers, also known as Googlers, were treated with a free Galaxy Nexus smartphone sporting a customized back cover depicting Android and Google Plus icons.

Then, in another display of holiday spirit, the company brought in much ice and snow and sprayed it in front of building B44, also known as the Android building, at their Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

The company’s social biz head Vic Gundotra posted the above image on his Google Plus profile with the caption: “Who says it never snows in Mountain View, California?”

The time-lapse clip below that shows the event was posted by Jason Chen, a technical program manager with Google. The search company did not forget about its users, surprising and delighting them with a few big improvements to Google Plus ahead of New Year. Google also let folks call Santa right from Gmail to leave him a Holiday message (Google Voice number 855-34-SANTA).

Lastly, Google tweaked its search engine with a snowflake animation. Go to Google.com and search for ‘let it snow’. This search term should produce snowflakes that will fill the page and eventually whiten out thesearch results. You can even click the left mouse button and drag the pointer around for fog removal. On an unrelated Holiday note, Google also revamped their Doodle website with the Google Plus design language.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osm1ldD1XwQ#!]

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