Commentary

Google Doodle Imagines John Lennon's 70th Birthday

A set of John Lennon's fingerprints ready for auction Saturday to mark the Beatle's 70th birthday has been seized by the FBI from a Manhattan store. A federal agent confiscated the prints at the Gotta Have It! store in East 57th Street, after seeing them displayed on a catalogue of pop memorabilia.

The New York Post reports that the agent believed the prints, valued at $100,000, belonged to the U.S. government and brought a subpoena to the store after one of the owners, Peter Siegel, initially refused to hand over the collection.

Google, with all the promotion around Lennon's 70th birthday, I must tell you when I first signed on to Google's search engine this morning I didn't see the Google doodle and felt a little cheated that U.K. residents could see the Google doodle, but U.S. residents could not.

I, too, am a fan of the Beatles. So, here's a bit more trivia for you. "Nowhere Boy," a movie that chronicles Lennon's life as a boy, debuts in the United States today. The movie stars Aaron Johnson as the rebellious Lennon. The Sam Taylor-Wood-directed film debuted at the London Film Festival in November 2009.

The doodle, however, represents much more than a celebratory illustration. The 32-second track in a video player demonstrates Google's innovation through Lennon's popular song "Imagine."

Imagine how the Liverpool-born musician would have felt to see Google's logo transform into a variety of butterfly, pinwheel and flower pictures before sending the searcher to a query page full of Lennon-related results listing news, videos and more.

The Google doodle not only highlights Lennon's accomplishments and pays respect to the deceased musician, but demonstrates Google engineers' innovations of transformation and skill.

The Fab Four--Paul, John, Ringo and George--as a group disbanded before I had the opportunity to see them perform as a group, but I did see Ringo and George in concert after they began separate recording careers.

Google accounted for 72.15% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 2, 2010, according to Experian Hitwise. In the stats released Friday, the research firm notes that Bing powered search received 23.64% of searches for the month, and Yahoo Search and Bing received13.54% and 10.10%, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 4.22% of U.S. searches.

Google may have become a money-making machine that bows to the needs of investors and advertisers, but the engineers and creators behind the innovations for the technology company know it all begins with a dream. Lennon managed to imagine that dream long before search engines existed.

 

4 comments about "Google Doodle Imagines John Lennon's 70th Birthday".
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  1. Steve Timpson from siteminis, inc, October 8, 2010 at 2:35 p.m.

    Paragraph 7 err... did you mean deceased? instead of "the diseased musician"?

  2. Laurie Sullivan from lauriesullivan, October 8, 2010 at 4:21 p.m.

    Yep, thanks Steve for pointing that out.

  3. Chris Nielsen from Domain Incubation, October 8, 2010 at 6:17 p.m.

    The only thing I can "imagine", is what John Lennon might think about this clever marketing campaign...

  4. Peter Drew from Peter Drew Communication Services, October 9, 2010 at 10:13 p.m.

    "Disease" instead of "deceased": probably an oversight by spelling and grammar checking programs in Ms. Sullivan's word processor. The error that really gets me, though, is spelling the word "lose," as in "I hate to lose at Scrabble," as "loose." Hey! The word sounds like it's got a double-o, so let's just spell it that way. I see it everywhere on the Web, especially in comments posted to forums and videos. Sheesh. That's why Noah Webster invented the dictionary. Standardize spelling to... mak...reeding...eezeeur. I know language changes over time, but, man, William Saffire and Edwin Newman must be spinning in their graves! :-)

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