Also runs a Jean-Paul Sartre doodle in a couple of countries

Jun 21, 2010 09:19 GMT  ·  By

For those of you who don’t know, this will be the longest day of the year, at least for half of the world. June 21th, also known as the Summer Solstice, is the day with the shortest night in the Northern Hemisphere. If you happen to be living in the southern half of the planet, today would be the Winter Solstice. The event has been celebrated since ancient times and Google is not one to break away from tradition. Both the Summer and Winter Solstice are marked by Google with a series of doodles on its homepage.

In the Northern Hemisphere, Google ran the ‘First Day of Summer’ or ‘Summer Solstice’ series of doodles in 20 or so countries. The four doodles tell a little story and are about the summer vacation. They’re done in an interesting ‘retro’ style and look pretty nice, quality wise.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Google ran the corresponding series with a winter theme. The visual style is the same as that of the Summer Solstice series and it was obviously created under the same umbrella. However, the doodles were available in fewer countries, China and South Korea and a few ones in South America.

Interestingly, Google decided to skip the Summer Solstice series in a couple of European Countries in favor of marking what would have been the 105th birthday of French existentialist writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. This doodle was available in France and Germany.

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This issue has been more prevalent recently, as Google runs more and more doodles. There are times when several events that Google would like to mark coincide, so it runs different doodles in different countries depending on what the people in those countries would be most interested in. At the same time, several events may be of importance or celebrated in some countries around the world, but not in others. This is why the Summer Solstice series was not ran globally, just in select countries.
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