Some people at Google must be getting really bored with the company's iconic logo judging by how often it replaces it. The search engine has been featuring “doodles” on its homepage to celebrate different events or people for years but lately it looks like every other day is a holiday at Googleplex. Regardless of whether Google just likes to party or is trying to inform, the search engine's homepage now features a bar code logo to celebrate, what else, the bar code's patent granting 57th anniversary which is today, but you probably knew that already.

As usual, Google isn't saying anything else, leaving the users to discover further information in a fitting way, by using the search engine. Clicking on the bar code celebratory logo which is, obviously, a bar code (apparently it spells out Google just in case you were wondering) will lead to a Google search for “bar code” which, in a classic case of chicken versus egg causality, returns the news about how Google now features a bar code logo on top of the regular results.

The bar code itself, as you'd find out by visiting the Wikipedia page for it, which is the first entry in the search results and the place most people will presumably go, was created by investors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, who filed for a patent in October 1949. The patent was finally granted on October 7, 1952 and the invention has since taken the world of supermarkets by storm. The bar code is now ubiquitous and almost invisible for most people but plays an important part in almost every aspect of our lives.

The bar code logo Google uses was encoded using the Code 128 standard, a common way of encoding ASCII character strings. The logo may have even been made using Google's own ZXing open source bar code project it uses in Android. Google has been sporting a lot of doodles lately, having just recently celebrated Ghandi's birthday, Confucius' birthday, the company's own birthday and going all out for H.G. Wells' birthday with a series of three mysterious doodles.