Google, Bing and Yahoo Mark the Start of the Vancouver Olympics

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are about to begin and the excitement is starting to build up. The Opening Ceremonies are set for later tonight, but, in the meantime, you can brush up on your history of the competition, the location or maybe the schedule of the events, by using a search engine of course. All the major search engines are marking the start of the competition with a custom homepage. It seems like Google has done a custom logo every other day or so lately, so there is absolutely no surprise here, but Yahoo and Bing are more reserved with the type of events they mark on their homepages.

Bing features a nice photo of the city and some of the competition venues for its trademark graphic background. It also has several search boxes 'hidden' in the page, which only reveal when you pass your mouse close to them. The boxes feature stuff like general information about the city and the history of the Olympics but also a link to the Bing Map of the location and a video of a "miracle" win of the US hokey team in 1980 against the USSR, hosted on YouTube no less.

Yahoo is a little more subtle and has an animated logo on the homepage alluding to the competition. Clicking on it leads to the dedicated Olympics portal on Yahoo Sports. Finally, Google has a special logo on the homepage, spanning from one side to the other. Doodles marking special occasions are nothing new for Google, but it looks like it tried to make this one stand out through its size.

Google has actually been pretty focused on the Olympics, especially when it comes to its mapping services. It recreated all the nine competition venues in 3D for Google Earth, one of the most detailed models available for the app. It also added Street View imagery of some of the locations and venues, even building a Street View snowmobile to access the slopes.