Google Runs 16 Mr. Men and Little Miss Doodles in the Same Day

Google is always trying to outdo itself with the doodles it sports on the homepage for special occasions. Sometimes it's with intricate, interactive logos, sometimes it's with videos, but other times, like today, it's doing it by sheer numbers.

Google has had 'multi-page' doodles before, but it's not doing this now, instead it's running 16 different doodles, picked randomly when a user lands on the Google homepage or the search results page.

Google is celebrating today with doodles depicting some of the most well known Mr. Men as well as Little Miss characters from the popular children's books.

Today would have been the birthday of the author of the series of books, Roger Hargreaves, born 9 May 1935. Hargreaves would have been 76 today.

2011 also marks 40 years from the publication of the very first issue of a Mr. Men children's book which appeared in 1971 featuring Mr. Tickle. Five more issues, featuring other characters such as Mr. Greedy or Mr. Sneeze, were published that year.

In total, 48 Mr. Men issues were published, most in the seventies and some in the past two decades. 42 Little Miss books were also published, starting from 1981, so 2011 is a special year for this series as well.

Google picked 17 of those characters to feature in today's doodles which are shown on the global homepage and many of the local search engines as well. The doodles follow Hargreaves' style and incorporate the Google logo in some way, as it's usually the case with the custom logos.

It's the first time Google used so many doodles for just one event. It's probably also the first time that different doodles are served randomly. Usually, when Google had more than one doodle, they played out a story and were just slides of a single doodle.