GOOGLE AND MEMORIAL DAY….Over at The Corner yesterday, Jonah Goldberg had the following bizarre complaint about Google:
It’s kind of sad. They change their homepage logo for all sorts of holidays and occasions. Just last week they paid tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. But Memorial Day doesn’t seem to rate anything at all.
This meme overtook the conservo-sphere, with bloggers everywhere claiming they planned to switch to other search engines due to Google’s manifest lack of patriotism.
Needless to say, lack of patriotism seemed unlikely in the extreme as the reason for Google’s lack of a special Memorial Day banner. So I asked them what was up. Here’s the answer from Megan Quinn in Google’s press office:
Google celebrates a wide variety of holidays with Google Doodles. Doodles are generally reserved for international holidays and famous birthdays.
As it happens, Google does occasionally mark purely American holidays, but for the most part Megan seems to be correct. They generally stick to birthdays and international stuff.
Conservative bloggers may now go about their business. It turns out the republic is safe from search engine doodlers after all.
