Google jams with Les Paul for one more day

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 10 June 2011 23:14

Your IT - Entertainment

Google knows that when you've got a wildly popular doodle on your hands, if you hold on for one more day, and let the users play, things will go your way.

If you haven't yet seen Google's latest homepage doodle celebrating Les Paul, you've got one more day to have a play.

Although Les Paul passed away in 2009, this year marks what would have been his 96th birthday, and given his legendary status, Google's guitar doodle has not only been naturally most appropriate, but also wildly popular.

This has been not only thanks to the instant and easy playability of the Google logo guitar, but also thanks to the ability for those connecting to the US version of Google.com to record their musical creations and share them with friends.

To find it, just go to Google.com, and if it connects to your country's local version, click the link at the bottom of the page that says "Go to Google.com" - and you'll be taken to the US Google.com.

A host of well known songs and tunes has already been created and shared on YouTube, and although Google's doodles do live on after they've left the front page, where they normally play for a day, the public has spoken.

A tweet from Google states that: 'Due to popular demand, we're leaving the Les Paul doodle up in the U.S. for an extra day. Thanks for jamming with us!'

Google's last big doodle hit was Pacman, although on a specially re-designed Google logo map that faithfully reproduced the ability to learn patterns to best play the game, the animated 'breaks' in between levels, and even the authentic crashing of the Pacman game due to a bug once 255 levels have successfully been reached and played.

So, whether you've played with Google and Les Paul as yet, or not, you've got one more day to play on the front page before this specific doodle gets a new page and goes on to live a life of its own.

It's also nice to see Google doodling around with a music program. Perhaps it has its own web and app based Garageband equivalent brewing in its labs to counter the force of Apple's software, with the Google Guitar but the first tiny hint of what's to come.

Either way, Google's latest way to make us spend even more time on its sites and gain some global free publicity has certainly worked.

I wonder what's next? We haven't seen a video-based Google logo yet that I can remember. Perhaps some cool James Bond-esque Google interactive movie trailer logo will one day make an appearance.

Until then, why not go ogle all of Google's homepage doodles and logos from around the world?

They're all here, with some pretty amazing works of art to see and enjoy.