What’s Up With The New Google Logo?

Anniversary of the Roswell UFO sighting?

I guess it is a bit deeper than that.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100003402/google-ufo-logo-mystery-solved/

From my personal experience, I occasionally misspell google as “gogle”, and apparently countless other people. I’d even go so far as to say that anyone who uses google a lot probably has misspelled it at one time or another.

If you type “gogle.com” in any web browser, it will redirect to google.com; this means that google has registered “gogle.com” as a domain with this very mistake in mind. Countless misspelled domains lead to malware and adware sites, so each time I misspell google, I thank google for passively protecting me against security threats.

From what I can tell, “gogle.com” has been registered as a google domain for several years. It’s possible that google’s ufo logo is celebrating several years of misspelling google.

I think it might also be a hint at google changing its spelling to “gogle” to make it more convenient to type, and to avoid all future misspellings. Or it may just be whatever Lumpy says it is, which I will proceed to take a look at now…

*note tried to access Lumpy’s reference, but it was blocked by my company’s proxy under the category “Political activism”)

( copied from http://mashable.com/2009/09/06/google-ufo-mystery-solved/ )

September 5th was the 20th anniversary of the game Zero Wing, from which the phrase and one of the most popular Internet memes of all time – “all your base are belong to us” – originates.

That bit of information completes most of the puzzle. Google was celebrating the anniversary of the game; the aliens that were stealing the “o” from Google could have been the aliens from the game, which also explains Google’s tweet which, when translated, says “All your o are belong to us”. Mystery solved!

After considering this additional info, I believe it supports my conclusion that google is celebrating misspellings. In fact, I think that it chose this specific day to allude to this.

This interpretation of the logo is also further supported by the otherwise somewhat cryptic response message google gave on twitter:

“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.”

Google’s allusion to Zero Wing, and their cryptic message, all point to the same problem: Just as Zero Wing’s quality as a game was ruined to English speakers because of a poor translation, Google is either:

(a) Concerned that the tendency to misspell their name is taking away (very little albeit) from the google brand (due to a modest amount of search content containing the word “gogle”, and some people inadvertently referring to google as gogle when rushing to post new content), and conveying this concern in a humorous and satirical way, or

(b) Presenting the notion (either jokingly or perhaps (god-forbid!) seriously) of changing google to gogle for reasons stated in my previous comment. This would best explain google’s cryptic tweet,

1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19

which translates to “All Your o Are Belong To Us”

Which implies that every time we misspell google as “gogle”, Google has abducted the other “O”, and/or by renaming google to gogle, google will have take the other “O” that we normally associate the company away from everyone (thus *All* your)

IMHO, I think that both of these (a&b) are correct, and google intentionally put up the logo to allude to several things at one, and also (even more profoundly), to allude to how powerful and versatile that google is, despite being comparably very simple (just as the logo is very simple from the surface, but apparently very complex once you read between the lines.

Yes I know I’m looking too much much into it :p

Yeah it is kind of strange. I think it is because of all the UFO talk recently as it has even been mentioned on the news. I like the logo though and think it is great that google add a new logo for different events.

Hi Matty,
It is great that Google has maintained their sense of humor. LOL