Sven Slootweg's Blog

Today a very remarkable image appeared on certain versions of Google (so far, the Dutch, Australian, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Argentinian, Japanese, and Chinese version) showing the Google logo, missing an ‘o’, replaced by a UFO. Clicking on it leads to a search page for “Unexplained Phenomenon”, translated into that particular language.

Now, what would this mean? Let’s take a look at the logo first. The filename is “go_gle.gif”. Instead of the usual filename telling us what the doodle is made for, this only adds to the mysteriousness, and again points out the missing ‘o’. Clicking on it brings us to a search results page, that doesn’t show any significant date-related results. However, what it does show is a list of news articles about this specific doodle (at least on the Dutch version it does that).

Now what is the meaning of this? Is there some unknown holiday today? Was it a joke of a Google designer/programmer? Is it a preview of an upcoming name change? Does it forebode a humorous advertising campaign coming up? Maybe, just maybe, it was all an experiment to see what would happen if they put up something “unexplained” (after all that’s what it is), and wanted to see how many pages would be dedicated to this “phenomenon”? My guess is the last one. Either that, or a joke. The rest just seems too unrealistic, and no other information can be found.

So let’s see if Wolfram Alpha can find us something. Searching for “holidays 2009″ gives us a list of internationally known holidays (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=holidays+2009). It doesn’t list anything remarkable for September 5. Let’s check Wikipedia. At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_5, we can see that nothing remarkable should be happening today. Now the big question is: what does the Google Doodle mean?

A few hours ago, Google released a clue through Twitter. Their message at http://twitter.com/google/status/3772868874 translates to “All your O are belong to us”, a wordplay on the traditional “All your base are belong to us”, a mistranslation from the Japanese game Zero Wing. This doesn’t give us an awful lot of extra information, however it does show that Google picked up the crowd of people that has been searching for clues on this Doodle. The rest of the Google account on Twitter does not release any clues.

I could only find one other source telling us anything about Unexplained Phenomenons on September 5. It’s a UFO sighting in Canada: http://www.ufoinfo.com/sightings/canada/040905.shtml. The Guardian, a British newspaper, however, makes a reference to Google in an article about UFOs that was posted today at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/05/unexplained-phenomenon-ufo-google. No further clues are released there though.

I think there is only one thing left to do: wait. Maybe, tomorrow, the second ‘o’ will be gone as well. Who knows.

Sources used: Google, Jeroen.com, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha