Interactive doodles have a permanent home there as well

Dec 16, 2011 16:40 GMT  ·  By

It's safe to say that doodles are a common appearance on Google these days. This year in particular, there has been one every week or so. While most are simple drawings, a few are very elaborate. Google has recreated entire games, virtual guitars and has played movies replacing the Google logo on the homepage.

Some of the coolest interactive doodles have found a permanent home at Google, as long as you know where to look for them. But not all of them have.

All that Google kept and made available after the day the doodles ran were the static images over at the Google Logos site.

The site archived all doodles ever created and enabled users to browse them chronologically. But that site is dead now. Fortunately, that's because there is now a Google Doodle site which is a great improvement over the old one.

"Since our very first one in 1998, doodles have been our way to share with you the things we love or are excited about. In the past few years we’ve started to create doodles that people can not only look at but also play with," Ying Wang, Director of Product Management at Google, wrote.

"Our first interactive one featured a clickable slideshow of Halloween candy in 2009 and since then we’ve invited people to insert a coin to play an arcade classic, watch a film, and even compose an epic guitar solo, all on the Google homepage," he said.

The new Doodles site sports the new Google design. It also makes it easier to browse the doodles by selecting the year and the region where it was available.

The most interesting addition though are the descriptions for some of the doodles. Each doodle has its own individual page and the most interesting ones have the story behind them as well. In some cases, you'll also get to see the initial sketches or alternative versions to the doodle that went live.

Reading how the doodle came about is almost as interesting as the doodle itself. Interactive or animated doodles are also housed there.