Google continues experimenting with its logo by changing it to commemorate what it deems as significant events in history. Last week, Google logo paid homage to Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday along with Google’s 11th birthday, today, the logo is showing a barcode which if read by a barcode scanner would transcribe to the name Google.
In case you’re interested to know, today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent of the barcode. The first patent for the barcode was filed by inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver. The original patent applied to a system that encodes data in circles and can be scanned in any direction. Through the years, this system has evolved into the rectangular barcode with strips of black and white line which is what we normally see on various items.
Like the previous iterations of the Google logo, the Google Barcode logo is linked to the search results for the query “bar code”. So if you’ve got time in your hands and your curious to learn more about bar code, you might want to click on the logo before Google reverts it to the original Google logo.
I don’t know about you but sometimes I can’t help but ask what’s the point of changing this logo. Is Google trying to give its otherwise “boring” site a little spike with its subtle unannounced changes? In retaliation with the “livelier” interface of Bing and Yahoo? But, isn’t the simplicity of Google.com’s interface one of the reason why Google gained its massive userbase?
