“40 years of Sesame Street” Google doodle. This after yesterday’s “20 years of Wallace & Gromit” one (which may have been UK only?).
I’m very fond of the Google doodles, and these last couple have been great fun, but they’re the first examples I can remember of doodles based around commercial products. They normally relate to events like the moon landing, a famous artist’s birthday etc.
The Google homepage must be one of the most valuable pieces of web real-estate around. Are they really promoting entertainment brands for free? Is this a sign that Google are going to start having “sponsored” homepages? (I’ve not really investigated this, but just a thought…)
Further, I’ve noticed (although have no specific data on this) that there have been much-more-frequent-than-usual doodles recently. The marketer in me thinks this is a deliberate attempt to differentiate from Bing for the mainstream non-geek, especially with the Microsoft search engine’s very picture-based homepage.
