I’ve been digging through the web a bit, and I found an article on Telegraph.co.uk stating the Google doodle mystery has been solved. It basically tells us that Google has decided to celebrate the anniversary of the “All your base are belong to us” meme from the Japanese game Zero Wing.

The article, however, doesn’t tell us who published this news. Is it really a Google employee that released this information? Or is it just made up by some guy browsing the web, and having the genius idea to “solve” the doodle? You’d think a rather big site like Telegraph.co.uk would provide some source of their information, but strangely they don’t.

Google did nothing to end the speculation with a statement saying: “We consider the second ‘o’ critical to user recognition of our brand and pronunciation of our name. We are actively looking into the mysterious tweet that has appeared on the Google twitter stream and the disappearance of the ‘o’ on the Google home page. We hope to have an update in the coming weeks.”

Doesn’t that sound like Google didn’t actually tell anyone the solution?

The truth, however, was that it was marking the 20th anniversary of Japanese video game Zero Wing.

No source is named anywhere in that piece of text. After this bit of information, the article continues, telling us about the origin of the phrase, and how it became popular. But still no mention of a source anywhere.

In the meantime, some sites take handy advantage of this event. For example, http://www.unexplainedphenomenon.org/ seems to promise more info about this “Unexplained Phenomenom”, but looks very suspicious. Personally I doubt it’s a real site, and I actually suspect it of being an outright scam. At the same time, http://www.googleunexplainedphenomenon.com/ is a site completely dedicated to finding the solution of this mystery. They give us some new info, including a machine translation of a Korean Google blog post.

Apparently this is the first hint in the form of a doodle, in a series of hints that will eventually lead us to the solution of the mystery. GoogleUnexplainedPhenomenom.com also lists a few possible answers to this mystery, that can be thought of with the current amount of information and hints. I guess we will have to wait until September 15 to get the next clue, and see what this is all about.

Still, what is the goal Google is trying to achieve? Are they purely trying to get attention and do some pre-marketing for a new product? Are they trying to entertain their users? Are they, maybe, even doing this just for fun, because they are bored with the usual work? We’ll just have to see. If I pick up any information, I will post it right here on my blog.

The above screenshot is slightly edited, to hide the non-interesting entries (it monitors my entire site) and to black out the IP addresses of my visitors. Privacy is important.

It shows, however, a LOT of visitors that do not have a referer. That would mean they either got the link to my article over MSN, IRC, or a similar communication method, or that they simply typed the address entirely by hand (which is unlikely). I’ve collected 40 of those no-referer visitors over the day (the normal amount of blog visitors is maybe 3 or 4 a day) and I have no clue where they are coming from. The most notable thing, though, is that the first option (links over IM applications) is pretty much impossible, since the first visitor to my article doesn’t have a referer either. I know there is someone in that list with Twitter as referer, another very weird thing. I doubt I’m on their front page, so it should show at least some search page or profile page in the URL. Maybe they’re my followers on Twitter?

Very, very weird.