14 DAY TRIAL // It was bound to happen sooner or later, Google's growing obsession with custom logos, aka doodles, to mark special events and celebrations has reached a point where it had to choose between two major occasions to feature on the homepage.
Since the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics kicked off a couple of days ago, Google has been running a series of themed doodles, with the occasional backlash but more on that later, just like it has for past iterations of the major sporting event. This year though, the event coincided with Valentines Day, a holiday which couldn't go unnoticed. It couldn't choose between the two so Google had a great idea and decided to make just one doodle for both events.
The Google homepage featured a doodle from the Winter Olympics series in the very recognizable style of the previous ones of a pair of ice skaters. If you look closer though, you'll notice that it has some Valentine's Day touches like the heart-shaped tracks left by the ice skates. Obviously the sporting event itself, figure skating, suits itself to the occasion. Finally, the tooltip on the image made it clear that Google was trying to kill two rabbits with one shot.
However, Google's other choices for the Olympic doodles didn't go down so well in one particular case. The search engine had a doodle depicting a luge athlete over the weekend but, in the light of the tragic accident of Georgian luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili, some people found it tacky or even a little disturbing. Google didn't waste any time dealing with the backlash and took down the doodle replacing it with a snowboarding-themed one. There were those who believed that the logo could be seen as a tribute to the late athlete, but Google decided to play it safe and remove the image.
