doodles

Google is helping the National Hockey League begin its abbreviated season.

The NHL's 48-game season will begin Saturday after a 113-day lockout, but the Web giant apparently recognizes that the ice will need some TLC before players can skate to their opening face off. So Google is rolling out a Zamboni doodle to clean things up.

The interactive doodle begins by launching a skater that scratches up the ice. A Zamboni ice resurfacer then appears that Web users can, using their mouse, manipulate through a series of tests to clean the ice.

The Zamboni pilot gets points for cleaning … Read more

Here's a chance for your child's drawing to find a platform bigger than the kitchen refrigerator. Google today announced the sixth annual Doodle 4 Google contest, which invites kids to submit a drawing that could appear on the Google homepage -- and to win thousands of dollars for themselves and their schools.

This year's theme is "My Best Day Ever..." Students in kindergarten through 12th grade are invited to submit a doodle. The winner gets a $30,000 college scholarship and wins a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school. … Read more

Are you experiencing a slightly dry feeling in your mouth? Are your limbs offering involuntary jitters and twitches?

The fiscal cliff negotiations can do that to you.

However, Google would like to tell you that it understands the pain of entering 2013 without a sheet to the wind.

Having presented a charming doodle for New Year's Eve (below), featuring so many of the characters from the doodles of 2012 (you can see all Google's doodles here), today it presents the cleanup.

Reality has chimed. The cleaners have arrived. Robert Moog, Moby Dick, and Niels Bohr have all gone … Read more

Today's Google Doodle honors the birth of a computer visionary who believed such machines could be more than just number crunchers.

Born December 10, 1815, Ada Lovelace is perhaps best known for her contributions toward Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Designed but never actually built until 1991, the Analytical Engine is in many ways one of the ancestors of today's computer systems.

A mathematician and writer, Lovelace took on the task of first translating and then expanding upon an article describing the Analytical Engine. Her notes contains what some people think of as early computer progams or algorithms, … Read more

I'm not feeling lucky. I'm feeling scared.

For Google has chosen November 8 to celebrate Dracula's daddy, Bram Stoker.

Yes, the latest doodle is an especially creepy tribute to Stoker's legacy -- which, some might say, has brought us to the apogee represented by Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

Stoker was actually Irish and was a theater critic before he sank his teeth into novels.

He began to write while he was the director of the Lyceum Theatre in London. His conception of Dracula was written as a series of made-up diary entries, newspaper clippings, and … Read more

Google's latest doodle may not be as interactive as some in the past, but it's pretty appropriate for the day.

The doodle follows an Election Day theme, directing people where to vote when they click on the Google search page image.

The first link listed is a box for users to enter their addresses for where they're registered to vote. Clicking "get my info" sends voters to Google's politics & elections page, with details about the user's polling place and ballot summary, as well as links to "insights," YouTube Live, and other election-related information. … Read more

I have had trouble sleeping since Monday, when I got a note in my mailbox. It contained images of ghouls and read "hahaha, you will never get away."

On investigation, it didn't come from my last girlfriend, but from candy-minded short people who live on my street and intend to extort me a little later. (Helpfully, they even declared the time of their visit.)

Now, in my already frayed state, I am confronted by Google doodling on my nerves for the sake of Halloween.

Naturally, the doodlers have only the best of intentions.

Yet here the letters … Read more

Doodle Hangman Free is a simple hangman game. You can select the types of words you want to guess from a list of categories (or choose random selections) and then a coarse doodle of a character gets drawn as you guess incorrectly. There's both one and two player variations, and after each correct solution a new background and word appear.

Doodle Hangman Free installs quickly and plays just as quick. We found the graphics were just like doodles, which were cute the first few times but got old fast. There's some basic animation but the graphics are not … Read more

I fancy that Google's doodlers sit in a room where every wall is a different color.

I imagine that they walk into work everything morning, not knowing what they will be doing, thinking or smoking.

And then they just chat.

Someone says something. Someone else says something entirely unrelated. And then, through some odd finger-pointing and head-bobbing, they reach a conclusion.

How else to explain today's doodle which celebrates the birthday of one of physics' great lights, Niels Bohr?

Bohr had such refined talents that not only did he win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922, but … Read more