Search Engines Paying Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

Knowing how important keeping users happy is for any web company, the main search engines have decided to pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and designed doodles, or changed the background on their homepages. All except for a few, amongst which one will stand out from the rest, as you'll see.

Google has decided as usual to go for a doodle, incorporating the tribute into its logo. A nice way to suggest that one of its main concerns is to make people happy, that every holiday is closely connected to the Mountain View based company's policy. It represents some three children, two black and one white, drawing a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on a sidewalk. The image is placed instead of the second "o" in the logo and a part of the drawing keeps the original yellow color.

Ask.com has, as always, changed the entire background for the search engine. A black and white picture of the famous man is displayed, with him gesturing in front of a huge crowd. Ask has always been my favorite special holiday option because of the complexity of the design of homepages exhibited.

The big name that I mentioned to be missing from the traditional list is Yahoo!. The Sunnyvale based company decided not to change its logo in any way or have it against a themed picture, as it usually did for the special holidays. That's a bit strange, knowing that the company is based on its users' happiness and that at the moment it's in something of a rough spot, needing any bit of support that it could muster. Then again, with the upcoming firings, it doesn't look like such a joyous time for the people there, so perhaps this is to be understood because of the internal struggles going on.