The super search giant Google replaces its well known logo with all kinds of funny pictures in order to celebrate holidays or events around the world. Since the company has regional versions of the search engine in lots of different countries, celebrating a local holiday is quite easy. Last week, the Google special logos, codenamed doodles, appeared in several countries around the world including UK, Germany, Australia and Turkey. As Haochi of Googlified wrote, Google celebrated the Saint George's Day (UK), the Girls' Day (Germany), the ANZAC Day (Australia) and the Children's Day (Turkey).

As far as we can see, the doodles are pretty important for the Mountain View company since they have been promoted for some time now. Beside the mentioned logos adjacent to the article, Google has also launched a new edition of the Doodle4Google contest, a special competition which asks children to design their own Google logo related to a certain event.

This time, the competition is only available to the 5 to 18 year-old children living in Germany, Switzerland and Austria who are asked to draw Google logos related to the upcoming European Championships. As you may know, Austria and Switzerland are the hosts of the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship which is scheduled to start on June 7.

According to Haochi, the winning doodle will be placed on the official page of Google Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the day of the Euro final (29 June, 2008) and will also win an Apple MacBook.

For those of you who don't know, the first Google logo was made by Sergey Brin in 1998 and, according to Wikipedia, it was created using GIMP, a photo manipulation application which is often regarded as the best freeware lightweight alternative for the popular Adobe Photoshop.